![]() ![]() Over 30 years, Hubble has enabled astronomers around the world to study black holes, mysterious dark energy, distant galaxies and galactic mergers. NASA is showing you the picture the Hubble Space Telescope took on your birthday Saturn from Far and Near (Hubble Space Telescope) NASA/ESA/Erich Karkoschka “One of the main reasons for building Hubble was to be able to measure more precisely the expansion rate of the universe,” Wiseman said. Hubble continued his work and discovered that distant galaxies appeared to be moving rapidly, suggesting that we live in an expanding universe that started with a big bang. Hubble’s work led to the revelation that our galaxy was one of many, forever changing our perspective and place in the universe. ![]() (He died in 1953.) Hubble relied on the work of astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s discovery of the periods of brightness in pulsating stars called Cepheid variables. The telescope was named for pioneering astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered in the 1920s that distant clouds in the universe were actually galaxies. They're four billion light-years away, but the streaks in the image belong to asteroids 160 million miles from Earth. Hubble captured this image of the distant galaxy cluster Abell 370, where several hundred galaxies are pulled together by gravity. “This has given us a new vantage point for viewing everything in the universe from the nearby solar system to distant galaxies and opened our eyes to the richness of the content of the universe and dynamic activity of the universe over time.” “And that came about simply because Hubble was placed above the atmosphere of the earth. “Hubble gave us a new sharp clarity in our view of deep space,” said Jennifer Wiseman, Hubble Senior Project Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. It orbits the Earth from a distance of 340 miles, well above the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere for observing space both near and far. ![]() These different wavelengths of light have allowed Hubble to peer into different regions of space that had never been observed before. The space observatory and its instruments, an international cooperative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency, captures unprecedented views of stars, galaxies and the distant universe in visible, ultraviolet and near-infrared light. The telescope’s ethereal, dreamy and almost fantasy-like views of space vistas have inspired people for decades and led to some of the most important astronomical discoveries. The Hubble Space Telescope launched 30 years ago on Friday, forever changing the way we see the universe. ![]()
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