Taking a good look into the Universe with a powerful telescope is a true blessing. Not only that it reveals the glory of the heavens, but it also shows us how privileged we are to be intelligent and conscious beings in a Universe that otherwise seems lifeless.
The Hubble Space Telescope operated by NASA and ESA is celebrating its 30th anniversary, and it’s ready to delight our eyes with another series of stunning pictures of our Cosmos.
This is a tiny portion of the extreme Deep Field, and as you can see, it looks beautiful.
This is a lensed galaxy nicknamed as the Sunburst Arc, and it’s about 10 billion years old.
This one is a background galaxy named PLCK G045.1+61.1, and as you can see for yourself, it appears as several red dots.
Introduction to Hubble
The Hubble Space Telescope was named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who way back in the ’20s made two huge discoveries for astronomy. He was the first to discover that our Universe is expanding, after taking a good look at other galaxies. By relying on the Doppler effect, which creates a redshift for objects moving away from us, Hubble concluded that many galaxies are constantly departing from Earth and other cosmic objects. This phenomenon could be explained by the fact that the Universe is expanding. The other great discovery lies in the discovery of the galaxies themselves. Until the ’20s, astronomers thought that the Milky Way is the only existing galaxy from the Universe.
The Hubble telescope was launched into orbit in 1990, and it’s one of NASA’s Great Observatories, along with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
