Birthday Wishes for Hubble
Hubble's gift to the public: The
Carina Nebula image
Astronomers are placing another candle on Hubble’s birthday cake. The Earth-orbiting telescope is celebrating its 17th birthday, making it a mere teenager. This teenager, however, has produced some breathtaking images of celestial objects and has helped astronomers answer many important questions about our universe.
A great observatory
The Hubble Space Telescope:
17 years in orbit
NASA launched the Earth-orbiting telescope on April 24, 1990, when George
W. Bush’s father was president and the World Wide Web was still a
dream. In its 17 years of exploring the heavens, the telescope
has snapped nearly 500,000 images of more than 25,000 celestial
objects. It has made nearly 100,000 trips around Earth. Those
trips have racked up lots of frequent-flier-miles —
more than 2.4 billion, the equivalent of a round trip to Saturn.
17 years of observations have produced more than 30 terabytes of data, equal to about 25 percent of the information stored
in the Library of Congress. Each day the orbiting observatory generates
about 10 gigabytes of data, enough information to fill the hard drive of
a typical home computer in two weeks.
The Hubble archive sends about 66
gigabytes of information each day to astronomers throughout
the world. Astronomers using Hubble data have published nearly 7,000 scientific
papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever
Hubble's birthday gift to the public
Zoomable Carina image:
Get as close or as far away as you want
To celebrate Hubble’s 17th birthday, NASA and the Space Telescope
Science Institute are releasing an image of the Carina Nebula, a 3-million-year-old
gigantic cloud of gas. The gaseous cloud is a busy star-making factory
that is churning out tens of thousands of stars. Peeking inside the star-making
factory, the Hubble Space Telescope offers a dramatic glimpse of a fairytale
landscape of dust and gas that is being sculpted by energetic young stars.
Looking near and far
This jaw-dropping image is just the latest of Hubble’s
many accomplishments. During its 17 years in space, Hubble
looked close to home at our solar system planets, gazed far
across space to see galaxies in their infancy, provided decisive
evidence for the existence of giant black holes, and detected
an invisible force that makes up the bulk of the energy in
Planets, planets everywhere
In our solar system neighborhood, the telescope witnessed
pieces of a broken-up comet smash into Jupiter, giving the
planet several “black eyes.” Hubble also spied
two new moons orbiting Pluto.
Peering at stars near the center of our Milky Way galaxy,
Hubble conducted a census of Jupiter-sized planets. The telescope
found 16 alien worlds, suggesting that there may be billions
of Jupiter-sized planets in our galaxy.
Witnessing stellar death
A Hubble study of stellar death
Turning its gaze to aging stars, Hubble took snapshots of the “last
hurrahs” of Sun-like stars. As ordinary stars begin to die, they shed
their outer layers of gas and glow as planetary nebulae. The telescope also
watched the aftermath of a supernova, the explosive death of a massive star.
The Hubble observations of Supernova 1987A helped astronomers rewrite the textbooks
on exploding stars.
Galaxies give up their
Hubble helped astronomers calculate a precise age for the
universe by measuring the distances to many galaxies. Astronomers
now think the cosmos is about 13.7 billion years old.
are everywhere in space, but Hubble looked far across our cosmos
to see their building blocks. The Hubble observations provided
solid evidence that galaxies grew over time to become the giant
galaxies we see today.
Peering into the hearts of galaxies,
Hubble provided decisive evidence that supermassive black holes
reside in many of them. These “eating machines” gobble
up any material that ventures near them. Black holes cannot
be seen directly because no material, including light, escapes
Shedding light on dark
Hubble's Top Science Findings:
17 years of science
By witnessing bursts of light from faraway exploding stars, Hubble helped
astronomers discover that a mysterious, invisible force called dark energy exists. The observations show that dark energy is making the universe expand
at an ever-faster pace. Physicist Albert Einstein predicted its existence
early last century, but he later said that his prediction was the biggest
mistake of his career. Now, astronomers are proving that Einstein may have
Although teenage Hubble has accomplished so much during its
17 years in space, its best scientific discoveries are yet
to come. NASA is planning another servicing mission to keep Hubble operating
for a few more years. Servicing mission astronauts will install two brand
new science instruments that will allow Hubble to probe even farther into
space. Who knows what secrets the telescope may uncover.