25 Years of the Hubble Space Telescope

This week NASA is celebrating a quarter century of discoveries from one of the most revolutionary scientific instruments of all time, the Hubble Space Telescope. Launched into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990, the Hubble changed our understanding of the age of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and the expansion of space itself. Along the way it has had the equivalent of knee and hip replacement surgery: Five times, astronauts on the space shuttle paid a visit to swap out old batteries and install new instruments. Hubble’s fate, however, is uncertain. The Hubble was designed to be serviced by the space shuttle, but the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, and the Hubble hasn’t had a repair job since 2009. At some point, under the laws of entropy that dominate the cosmos, the Hubble will begin to deteriorate.

Hubble’s unique advantage is that it is orbiting the Earth about 340 miles above the surface, significantly higher than the International Space Station, which means both crystal-clear images as well as access to parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that are not available from the ground.

The 44-foot-tall Hubble orbits the Earth 15 times a day. Its 2.4-meter diameter mirror has a resolution of equivalent to shining a laser on a dime 200 miles away.

Before the Hubble, astronomers estimated the universe to be 10 billion to 20 billion years old, but Hubble indicates that it’s 13.8 billion years old. The Hubble played a key role in the stunning discovery–announced in 1998–that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Astronomers detected this acceleration, which they attribute to a mysterious force they call “dark energy,” in part by using the Hubble to study supernovas in extremely distant galaxies.

Named for Edwin Hubble, the pioneering astronomer whose study of the expanding Universe revolutionized modern astronomy, the Hubble was conceived in the 1940s and designed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized nearly every area of astronomy, from the solar system (where it watched the aftermath of comets impacting Jupiter), to the very edge of the visible universe, and it is said to have been responsible for more discoveries than any other scientific instrument in history,

The deep gaze of the Hubble offers a view into the remote past; all telescopes are time machines of sorts, gathering light emitted long ago. The Hubble can see deeper into space than anyone had anticipated when the telescope was first designed. Before Hubble, we didn’t know how many galaxies there are in the universe, astronomers calculated perhaps tens of billions of galaxies, but now, thanks to the Hubble, scientists can say there are roughly 200 billion.

M81, a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way, is one of the brightest galaxies that can be seen from Earth.

Several million young stars are vying for attention in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a raucous stellar breeding ground in 30 Doradus, located in the heart of the Tarantula Nebula. Early astronomers nicknamed the nebula because its glowing filaments resemble spider legs.

The composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the National Science Foundation’s 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, near Tucson, Ariz. Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute assembled these images into a mosaic

A photogenic and favorite target for amateur astronomers, the full beauty of nearby spiral galaxy M83 is unveiled in all of its glory in this Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image. The vibrant magentas and blues reveal the galaxy is ablaze with star formation. The galaxy, also known as the Southern Pinwheel, lies 15 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has trained its razor-sharp eye on one of the universe’s most stately and photogenic galaxies, the Sombrero galaxy, Messier 104 (M104). The galaxy’s hallmark is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revisited the famous Pillars of Creation, revealing a sharper and wider view of the structures in this visible-light image.

A new image from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes looks more like an abstract painting than a cosmic snapshot. The magnificent masterpiece shows the Orion nebula in an explosion of infrared, ultraviolet and visible-light colors. It was “painted” by hundreds of baby stars on a canvas of gas and dust, with intense ultraviolet light and strong stellar winds as brushes.

In celebration of the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble’s eye to an especially photogenic group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273.

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a companion star to a rare type of supernova. This observation confirms the theory that the explosion originated in a double-star system where one star fueled the mass-loss from the aging primary star.

Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full Moon.

Gas released by a dying star races across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour, forming the delicate shape of a celestial butterfly. This nebula is also known as NGC 6302 or the Bug Nebula.

The Cat’s Eye Nebula, one of the first planetary nebulae discovered, also has one of the most complex forms known to this kind of nebula. Eleven rings, or shells, of gas make up the Cat’s Eye.

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Hubble should keep doing good science at least until 2020 and eventually deteriorate until it reenters the atmosphere around 2037. That might mean the Hubble would overlap for a couple of years with the operations of the Webb Space Telescope which is scheduled for launch in late 2018.

The Hubble has changed our very sense of the universe we live in, and it continues to provide views of cosmic wonders never before seen.  In commemoration of 2015’s 25^th anniversary of the HST, the Pennington Planetarium at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum has on display 25 of the most intriguing images taken by HST over the past twenty-five years.