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Happy 25th Hubble

NASA

In this episode of Our Island Universe, we look back at 25 years of discovery thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble Site

Credit NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team
Westerlund 2 — Hubble’s 25th anniversary image

Transcript:

On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center with the Hubble Space Telescope tucked away in its cargo bay. Named after one of America’s pioneering astronomers, Edwin Hubble, who discovered the expanding Universe. The data returned from the HST has fundamentally changed our view of the cosmos.

Located above the Earth’s atmosphere and free from its blurring effects, the HST promised astronomers an unprecedented view of the Universe. In its 25 years in low earth orbit, the school bus-sized observatory has provided us with evidence that the Universe is not only expanding, but is in fact accelerating. That discovery resulted in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. It helped to measure the age of the Universe — 13.8 billion years old — to better than 1% accuracy! It stared at an empty patch of sky roughly the size of the full moon and took one of the deepest images of space ever taken. In that deep exposure, we found that galaxies are littered everywhere we look, some of them formed as early as 500 million years after the Big Bang! It peered into the centers of galaxies and provided the evidence that lurking in the dark are supermassive black holes that can weigh as much as a billion times the mass of the Sun! It studied in great detail the material shed by massive stars that explode in violent supernovae. The explosions it has witnessed have unveiled the effects a supernova can have on the surrounding galaxy, including how the released energy affects the chemistry of its environment. It has not only provided us with images of young stars that are just now forming planets around it but it has also allowed us to detect atmospheres around a few exoplanets.

Today, as Hubble turns 25 years old, it is still productive. Approximately 2 scientific papers are published every day that make use of Hubble data. While the HST has forever changed our view of the cosmos, I think its greatest legacy has been in stoking our imagination of what’s out there, and in inspiring the next generation of American scientists and engineers.

Happy birthday Hubble!