![]() Hubble also helped turned a staple of science fiction into science fact. ![]() The instrument's images have helped scientists understand how galaxies evolve. Previous estimates had suggested that galaxies didn't form until the universe was at least two billion years old. Hubble has helped survey galaxies that existed when the universe was only 600 million years old. The space telescope probed the core of these collisions and uncovered a new class of exceptionally large and bright star clusters. When scientists discovered galaxies with long tails of gas and dust - the remnants of mergers - they turned Hubble toward them to reveal details. Mergers are common beyond the Milky Way, as Hubble has shown. By measuring the sideways motion of the approaching Andromeda galaxy, scientists were able to determine that the two will merge in approximately four billion years. Our Milky Way galaxy is set to suffer a head-on collision with its neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, and the world has Hubble to thank for the heads-up. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. In 2008, Hubble captured the first photograph of a planet beyond the solar system. The current best estimate is 13.82 billion years. By studying special pulsating stars known as Cepheid variables, Hubble helped astronomers nail down the age of the universe with an accuracy of about 5 percent. Prior to Hubble's launch, estimates for the age of the universe ranged from 10 to 20 billion years - a significant gap. The telescope has also provided evidence for the existence of dark energy, the mysterious force that counteracts gravity, causing galaxies to move away from one another at an accelerating pace. One of the main goals for Hubble was to determine just how quickly the universe is stretching. NASA's most famous space telescope was named for American scientist Edwin Hubble, who determined that the universe is not static but expanding. (New Horizons launched in January 2006 and will fly by the Pluto system on July 14.) The life of the universe NASA's New Horizons mission will begin taking images to rival Hubble's in May 2015, but it took the craft more than nine years to get close enough to give the space telescope a run for its money. Hubble has also peered at the distant dwarf planet Pluto, helping astronomers make maps of its surface, and even discovering four new Pluto moons. Hubble also studied the geology of the asteroid Vesta, which Dawn orbited from July 2011 through September 2012. ![]() NASA's Dawn spacecraft will attempt to determine the composition of Ceres' mysterious bright spots when its science mission begins on April 23. Hubble also captured images that revealed bright and dark regions on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Other images of Jupiter revealed unexpectedly low amounts of water in the atmosphere of the gas giant. Hubble captured the comet as it broke up, offering insights into the role comets may have played in delivering water and other material to the solar system's planets, including Earth. Not long after the fix, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter. ![]() But astronauts fixed the problem during a servicing mission in 1993, and Hubble began to produce the beautiful, iconic images for which it is now known. The Hubble Space Telescope reached space with a flawed mirror and initially returned blurry images of the cosmos. Showalter (SETI Institute))Īmerican astronomer Lyman Spitzer began to lobby for a space-based instrument in 1946, and a little more than two decades later, NASA started designing the "Large Space Telescope." (It was named after famous astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1983.) NASA's Hubble Telescope discovered four of Pluto's five known moons.
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