I love the sky and space. Watching stars and staring in the space is one of my favorite thing to do when I am outside. Other day I watched this documentary on how we can study galaxies, multiple versions of her overlapping and it’s mysterious moves. I think sometimes it is wonderful and nice to see various videos showing the space, universe, planets, solar systems. The documentary provided details that we have access to this vast information due to Hubble Telescope. So I thought I will study and read more on Hubble Telescope.
The Hubble Space Telescope launched April 24th,1990 on the Space Shuttle Discovery.
NASA Scientists were able to observe and learn galaxies, planets, and solar systems. In the past Galileo designed and engineered Telescope were used in the past which was significant contribution to the world’s observational astronomy. Although Galileo’s Telescope helped us to discover Venus phases, Saturn rings, and study sunspots. So Galileo’s contribution is huge. However since April 1990, the Hubble Telescope’s brought significant research opportunities and assisted spearheaded new exploration.
The Hubble has accomplished a ton during its three decades in orbit: It’s revealed the age of the universe, the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, how planets form…
The universe is like a giant fungus, constantly recycling matter and growing new structures, releasing its cosmic spores. And Hubble is like, this fluffy dinner roll. The Hubble Space Telescope helps scientist to see those objects high resolution images and just like when that light left those distant objects. As per NASA scientist who works on Hubble Telescope said Telescope helps scientist to understand how the universe has evolved over the years. The Hubble engineer said sometimes it can take billions of years for the light to get to the telescope. So scientist can actually see what all those things looked like, billions and billions of years ago.
the Hubble Space Telescope has a lot of components on it that are redundant. That means there’s two or more that can do the same job. One of the things that we’ve had trouble with historically are the gyroscopes.
As per NASA As per NASA and the Hubble reports there are six gyroscopes on the telescope and there are only three of them are operating.The following diagram shows a Hubble’s gyroscopes.
The Hubble engineer said there are about 250 people on various part of the this mechanism. About 150 of them are scientists and engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Quote: Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation
– Edwin Powell Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae
I always wondered how several galaxies, planets or anything in the space are help together and not fallen. Just like Newton’s Law, the answer is gravity. While studying how Hubble Telescope has helped human, I found out that Newton’s law of universal gravitation applies for this question too. One of the study showed that clusters of galaxies are all held together by gravity. As you can imagine, a galaxy is collections of billions of stars. Look at the following picture and YouTube video below.
Quyen Hart: A nebula is just a really fancy word for dust and gas in the universe. There are a lot of different nebulas in the universe, but this one is in the southern constellation of Carina. And it’s picturing about 50 lightyears across here of a region in space that is forming stars.
The animation zooms in to the image of the Carina Nebula. Hart gestures to indicate the 50 lightyears that the image spans.
Following Carina Nebula feature
Photo Credit: NASA
As per astrophysicist and NASA scientist can look at Mystic Mountain, as they get closer and closer to Mystic Mountain in this above visualization. There are things that you cannot even imagine and visualize without powerful telescope. The Hubble Telescope has helped us to identify and visualize these in detail study.
Due to the Hubble Telescope can the research and studies have been helping scientists to understand how stars like the Sun are formation and slowdown phase. These are significant discoveries.
Could you imagine if we can understand sun formation and slow down phase. That is huge. I know The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old – gauged on the age of other objects in the Solar System that formed around the same time. Based on observations of other stars, astronomers predict it will reach the end of its life in about another 10 billion years.it from me.
With that being said I look forward to understand this universe more. While studying for this article I found out that our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and thanks to Hubble Telescope there might be another 10 billion years. This is based on the studies that were conducted in the past in the solar system around the same time.
Hope this article helps you and inspires you to research more. I will finish by saying Stay Inspired!
Image credits, References and Sources:
- Hubble launch (0:23) – NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
- Flight to Star Cluster Westerlund 2 (0:35) – NASA, ESA, G. Bacon, L. Frattare, Z. Levay, and F. Summers (Viz3D Team, STScI), and J. Anderson (STScI)
- eXtreme Deep Field (1:37) – NASA, ESA, and F. Summers, L. Frattare, T. Davis, Z. Levay, and G. Bacon (Viz3D Team, STScI)
- Wikipedia
Additional resources:
- what will happen to the Earth when the sun dies, from Live Science.
- Learn more about how stars form, evolve and die, from NASA.
- Watch: The Death of the Sun, from PBS Space Time.
- Galaxy cluster (3:16) – ESA (European Space Agency)/Hubble & NASA, RELICS
- Quasar (3:35) – NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STSci)
- Mystic Mountain (3:55) – NASA, G. Bacon, L. Frattare, Z. Levay, and F. Summers (STSci/AURA)
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