Celebrate Hubble's 35th Birthday with Four New Images from the Orbiting Telescope
Fluctuations in the air distort the light coming from space and mess with ground-based observations. It's the reason the stars appear to twinkle in the night sky. They send their light our way in a more or less steady stream of photons, but it gets wiggled a little at the finish line, as it travels through the atmosphere on the way to our eyes.
Ground-based telescopes use a variety of systems including deformable mirrors and artificial laser-based reference stars to correct for atmospheric distortion in real time. They're also often built at high altitudes, at the tops of mountains, to get above as much of the atmosphere as possible. The SOFIA Observatory (short for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) went as far as strapping a telescope to a modified Boeing 747 and flying at altitudes up to 45,000 feet during observations.
But if you want truly clear images, you have to make like the crew of The Ark (streaming now on Peacock) and get off the Earth. That's why the Hubble Space Telescope, the world's most beloved orbiting telescope, has been the gold standard for decades. Today, Hubble celebrates its 35th birthday.
The 24,000-pound Hubble Space Telescope launched into orbit 35 years ago, on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. When the first data came back from above the atmosphere, scientists on the ground quickly realized something was wrong. Instead of the crisp, clear images astronomers were expecting, everything came back blurry.
Hubble's primary mirror had a small but important flaw. The edges had been ground too flat by a fraction the width of a human hair. It was enough that the mirror couldn't focus light correctly. Fortunately, NASA had already been working on an upgraded camera to be installed by astronauts at a later date.
Before the updated camera went into orbit, it was modified with corrective optics to balance the flaw in the mirror and return the crisp images astronomers were looking for. An array of smaller mirrors also helped to focus light from the mirror as it was sent to the telescope's other instruments. Astronauts carried out a total of five service missions to Hubble, upgrading or repairing instruments, between 1993 and 2009.
While other orbiting telescopes have been launched in recent years, Hubble remains the most recognizable and longstanding orbital observatory in history.
'Hubble opened a new window to the universe when it launched 35 years ago. Its stunning imagery inspired people across the globe, and the data behind those images revealed surprises about everything from early galaxies to planets in our own solar system,' said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement.
Hubble was designed to last 15 years and provide cutting edge views of the cosmos. Thirty-five years later it's still trucking along, though it's feeling its age. Parts have broken down and the telescope is now limping along on a single gyro, instead of its original three. That hasn't stopped it from continuing to send back stunning new images of everything from our closest planetary neighbors to distant galaxies.
To celebrate Hubble's 35th anniversary in orbit, NASA released a set of four new images highlighting the breathtaking capabilities of the world's favorite telescope. The above mosaic includes a closeup of Mars (top left) as it was in late December 2024; icy clouds can be seen hovering at the poles, at a distance of 61 million miles. At upper right, outflows of radiation and stellar winds from a dense white dwarf create the sprawling beauty of the nebula NGC 2899. A star forming region in the Rosette Nebula can be seen swirling hydrogen gas and dust in the lower left; and the spiral galaxy NGC 5355 can be seen at lower right, patches of star formation punctuating its landscape and a bright bar of stars, gas, and dust spans its center.
Hubble's three-and-a-half-decade lifetime has allowed astronomers to observe cosmic objects over extended periods to see how they change and evolve over time. In addition to peering at the very edges of the observable universe, Hubble has investigated things like seasonal changes of solar system planets, expanding supernovae, pulsars, and more.
The telescope has made more than 1.7 million observations of roughly 55,000 targets, resulting in thousands of scientific publications. More than that, it changed the way we visualize and think about the universe, and our place within it.
See the distant cosmos up close in The Ark, .
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Scientists Discover What Appears to Be the Largest Black Hole in the Universe, So Heavy That It Completely Bends the Light Around It Into a Giant Ring
Astronomers have discovered what could be the largest black hole ever detected. With a mass of 36 billion times that of our Sun, its gravity is so powerful that it bends the light of an entire galaxy behind it into a near-perfect circle called an Einstein ring, effectively reducing a realm with trillions of stars of its own into an astrophysical fashion accessory. It's 10,000 times as heavy as our Milky Way's own central black hole, and is nigh unto breaking the universe's theoretical upper limit. If anything ever warranted being called a cosmic monster, it's this. "This is amongst the top ten most massive black holes ever discovered, and quite possibly the most massive," Thomas Collett, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth and coauthor of a new study about the giant in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, said in a statement about the work. Other detections of similar sized objects, Collett noted, have generally come with uncertainties too large to be definitive. This not-super but ultramassive black hole lurks in the center of the famous Cosmic Horseshoe galaxy, which itself ranks among the most massive ever spotted. The galaxy is considered a fossil group, which formed from other large galaxies — and their constituent supermassive black holes — collapsing together. "So we're seeing the end state of galaxy formation and the end state of black hole formation," Collet said. It's no exaggeration to say, then, that we're literally witnessing a black hole's final form. Located some five billion light years away, the Cosmic Horseshoe is so named due to its gravitational lensing effect, a phenomenon in which the light of a background galaxy is warped by the gravity of a foreground one. Lensing is common throughout the cosmos, and it can be a fortuitous tool for astronomers, acting like a magnifying glass that allows them to observe distant objects whose light would otherwise be too faint to examine. But in this case, the huge foreground galaxy and its companion in the background happen to be in almost perfect alignment with our Earthly perspective, bending the light into an incomplete ring. Astronomers have long suspected that there was a black hole at the heart of the Cosmic Horseshoe, but have never been able to spot — let alone measure — it. One of the reasons why is its extreme distance, at billions of light years away. But the even more impressive hurdle that's been overcome is that it's a "dormant" black hole that's no longer accreting matter, according to Carlos Melo, lead author from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. "Typically, for such remote systems, black hole mass measurements are only possible when the black hole is active," Melo said. "But those accretion-based estimates often come with significant uncertainties." When a black hole devours significant amounts of matter, the infalling material gets heated up and radiates huge amounts of energy and light, forming what's known as an active galactic nucleus. (The brightest of these are called quasars.) But this detection "relied purely on [the black hole's] immense gravitational pull and the effect it has on its surroundings," Melo said. Their method involved a combination of lensing and what's known as stellar kinematics, which allows astronomers to infer a black hole's mass by studying the velocity of stars trapped in the surrounding galaxy. "What is particularly exciting is that this method allows us to detect and measure the mass of these hidden ultramassive black holes across the universe, even when they are completely silent," Melo said. And its size is no coincidence. There's a reason, the astronomers argue, that we're finding this ultramassive rarity in one of the heaviest galaxies on record, and not in one of relatively unremarkable size like our Milky Way, which hosts a comparatively puny black hole of 4.3 million solar masses. "We think the size of both is intimately linked," Collet said, "because when galaxies grow, they can funnel matter down onto the central black hole." That may seem like an obvious conclusion to draw, but how supermassive black holes attain their enormous sizes remains one of the great mysteries of cosmology. Some have been spotted so early on in the universe's history that they physically shouldn't exist, not having enough time to accrete the mass they possess. If it formed from galactic mergers, it provides a strong clue of at least one mechanism that can spawn these colossal objects. More on black holes: Bizarre "Infinity Galaxy" Could Hold the Secrets of Supermassive Black Holes Solve the daily Crossword
Boston Globe
7 hours ago
- Boston Globe
In troubled times on earth, the cosmos offers transcendent images
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory opened in June. Jointly operated by the National Science Foundation and US Department of Energy, it's located in northern Chile. The observatory's mission is to conduct a 10-year survey of the southern night sky. The images released so far have been astounding. They can be seen at The Vera C. Rubin Observatory. MARCOS ZEGERS/Marcos Zegers/The New York Times For almost as long as there has been photography, there have been photographs taken of the nighttime sky. The The Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, as seen from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. VERA C. RUBIN OBSERVATORY/NSF/DOE/Vera C. Rubin Observatory Advertisement Rubin was an astronomer who did pioneering work on galactic rotation rates. The Hubble is named for the cosmologist Edwin Hubble, and Webb was a pioneering NASA administrator. Both the Hubble and Webb have the advantage of being in outer space, without Earth's atmosphere to contend with. The Rubin has the advantage of possessing the world's largest digital camera. Advertisement The size of a small SUV, the observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera weighs more than three tons and has a 3.2-gigapixel sensor. That means the camera's resolution is more than 1,500 times greater than that of a high-definition television. Not surprisingly, distant galaxies require, let alone deserve, a greater degree of detail than Netflix does. Calibrating the camera at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. MARCOS ZEGERS/Marcos Zegers/The New York Times The observatory and telescopes afford a technological portal to a realm not just beyond comprehension but effectively beyond the imagination. 'The game I play is a very interesting one,' the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said. 'It's imagination in a tight straitjacket.' The celestial photography produced by the Rubin, Hubble, and Webb removes that straitjacket. Or as the poet Paul Celan once wrote, 'there are/still songs to sing beyond/mankind.' The LSST camera is a particularly stunning reminder that before it's anything else a camera is a machine. That machine can be a tool or a plaything, a means to create art or a selling point for a smartphone upgrade — or, yes, all of the above. Yet whatever the intended purpose, that machine executes the same action. A camera captures a moment in time that also existed in space. How artfully it does so is up to the camera operator. How memorably it does so is owing to some combination of the ability of that operator, the quality of the machine, and the nature of the subject. The "Cosmic Cliffs," photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA With art photography, the emphasis is on the ability of the operator: the artist. With celestial photography things are different. The operator rarely matters, albeit there are notable exceptions, one of which we'll also get to later. It's far more likely to be an algorithm than an actual person deciding where, when, and how to direct the lens. So rather than the emphasis being on the operator it's on these phenomenal machines and the even more phenomenal subjects they record: galaxies and nebulae and constellations. Advertisement Time assumes a different aspect with celestial photography. It becomes the intersection of the instant when the lens registers light — that's true of all photography — and the light years it took for that light to reach the lens. Space, too, assumes a different aspect. It becomes literally cosmic, a distance defying dimensionality, a realm so vast the human mind cannot begin to comprehend it even as the camera documents small slices of it — which is also to say small slices of that vastness. Galaxy M83, the Southern Pinwheel, in a photo mosaic taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. REUTERS/NASA A certain much-used cliché has it that a picture is worth a thousand words. Like most clichés, it has a basis in reality. It acknowledges the uniquely thick descriptive power of the photographic image. Here, though, words take a back seat to wonder. Images like these render meaningless adjectives like 'spectacular' and 'astonishing' and 'overwhelming.' They seem not just earthbound but Earth-bound. Actually, that's not quite right. When the words are names, rather than mere modifiers, then they have a capacity to evoke that complements the images' power to reveal: Virgo Cluster, Large Magellanic Cloud, Triffid Nebula, Pillars of Creation, Cosmic Cliffs, Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, Lagoon Nebula, Southern Pinwheel, Pandora's Cluster. The names are as poetic as the images are epic (far too weak a word, but you get the idea). Advertisement If the statement 'a picture is worth a thousand words' is one cliché that's relevant here, another is the question 'But is it art?' If we define art as beauty mediated through human handiwork, then of course these images are. They are so utterly alien to human experience as to confound our standard aesthetic ideas. They don't just transcend our sense of beauty. They transcend our sense of … everything. Vincent van Gogh, "The Starry Night," 1889. Museum of Modern Art Long before telescopes, let alone space telescopes, Joining their ranks is the photographer An-My Lê. Earlier this year, the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York showed her series Advertisement An-My Lê, "Sun Point View, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, 2024," from "Dark Star," 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery/© An-My Lê 'Dark Star' is both a marked departure for The series shares a dynamic with the images from Hubble, Webb, and Rubin: the stars above, a human viewer below. But 'Dark Star' crucially differs from them in two key respects. First, there's the matter of human agency. Lê is the image-maker here, not an algorithm or computer program. Comparing the photographs within the series, one is aware of the countless decisions she had to make in deciding where to place the camera, when to click the shutter, what to emphasize. Also, 'Dark Star' explicitly connects the cosmos with Earth. The Rubin and space-telescope images leave out the planet. What they show is out there — way, way out there. Part of the power of Lê's photographs is the way they include the Earth. Each has a horizon line in the lower portion of the image, serving as a further, internal frame. It's a frame felt as well as seen. A Dec. 24, 1968, photo that shows the Earth behind the surface of the moon during the Apollo 8 mission and Earth as seen from Apollo 17 in 1972. NASA As it happens, the two most famous astronomical images show Earth, not outer space. They were taken on Apollo missions: 'Earthrise,' from 1968, and 'The Blue Marble,' from 1972. Both look back at the planet, not out from. How much of the appeal of the Rubin and space-telescope images is that they let us leave terrestrial concerns so exceedingly far behind? In April, Lê gave a lecture at Harvard. It included slides from 'Dark Star.' 'Perhaps it's the right time to look for a little comfort in the cosmos,' she mused. Advertisement Globe staffer Matt Juul contributed to this article. Star songs for the starry-eyed Celestial photography lets us see the music of the spheres. Here are 10 tunes to listen to while star gazing. Mark Feeney can be reached at
Forbes
11 hours ago
- Forbes
NASA's Hubble Tracks Alien Comet Moving At 36-Miles/Sec Towards Sun
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have captured the sharpest-ever image of comet 3I/ATLAS — an 'interstellar interloper' — revealing it to be the fastest ever comet seen so far. The comet, first spotted by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on July 1, 2025, comes from another star system. It's only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected. 36 Miles Per Second 3I/ATLAS is traveling through our solar system at a staggering 130,000 miles (209,000 kilometers) per hour — or 36 miles per second (58 kilometers per second) — the highest velocity ever recorded for a solar system visitor. It appears to be behaving like a normal solar system comet, with Hubble capturing a dust plume ejected from the sun-facing side of the comet alongside a dust tail streaming away from the nucleus. Astronomers believe this record-breaking speed is the result of countless gravitational encounters during its interstellar voyage. "It's like glimpsing a rifle bullet for a thousandth of a second. You can't project that back with any accuracy to figure out where it started on its path,' said David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, science team leader for the Hubble observations, in a press release. Largest Ever Interstellar Object Far larger than either of the other two interstellar comets found in recent years — 1I/'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019 — the arrival of 3I/ATLAS offers scientists a rare opportunity to study a visitor from another star system. However, it's proving difficult to observe. Hubble's new observations suggest the comet's icy nucleus could be as large as 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) in diameter, but it may also be as small as 1,000 feet (320 meters), say the authors of a new paper published on arXiv, a platform for disseminating research, but which isn't yet peer-reviewed. It's due to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Other large telescopes have had a similar problem, including the James Webb Space Telescope, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the W.M. Keck Observatory. Where Did 3I/ATLAS Come From? The speed at which 3I/ATLAS is traveling makes observations very difficult. 'No one knows where the comet came from,' said Jewitt. 'This latest interstellar tourist is one of a previously undetected population of objects bursting onto the scene that will gradually emerge." The detection of 3I/ATLAS has been possible because of powerful sky survey capabilities, something that's about to be bolstered even further with the opening of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. It has already detected interstellar object 3I/ATLAS and may detect up to 50 more during its 10-year mission, according to a new model. "We've crossed a threshold," said Jewitt. Threat To Earth 3I/ATLAS poses no threat to Earth — in fact, it's passing through the opposite side of the sun to where Earth currently is and will make its closest approach to the sun in October, when it will be behind the sun and be lost in its glare from Earth's point of view. It will pass relatively close to Mars. 3I/ATLAS should remain visible to ground-based telescopes until September, when it will pass too close to the sun to observe, but it's expected to reappear by early December as it departs the inner solar system. Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
