Spaceflight Insider
Laurel Kornfeld
The Hubble Space Telescope, imaged during its last servicing mission in 2009. Credit: NASA
During its 31 years of activity, the Hubble Space Telescope has been “one of the most successful scientific experiments in history,” used to research numerous fields of astronomy ranging from cosmology and the expansion of the universe to the characterization of exoplanets, said astronomer Tom Brown of the Space Telescope Science Institute in a March 2 online presentation.
A joint NASA/European Space Agency project, Hubble launched in 1990. Through servicing missions conducted between then and 2009, it became increasingly more powerful.
The telescope orbits the Earth at an altitude of 333 miles (536 kilometers) and takes 95 minutes to circle the planet. It is powered by solar arrays when traversing Earth’s day side and batteries when passing over its night side.
"If you're puzzled by what dark energy is, you're in good company." -Saul Perlmutter
We normally assume that the fundamental constants of the Universe are actually constant, but they don’t have to be that way. They could vary in space, in time, or with the energy density of the Universe, in principle. Before believing in such an extraordinary claim, however, you’d need some remarkable evidence. It’s arguable that exactly that sort of evidence is emerging: from the tensions in the expansion rate of the Universe.
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What we see from an active galaxy depends in large part on our viewing geometry. If the jet is aimed at us we can see high-energy light like X-rays and gamma rays. If we see the dust torus edge-on it can block most of the high-energy stuff and we only see optical or infrared light. There s a whole menagerie of active galaxy types out there.
Quasars tend to have a lot of high-energy light (the first was discovered by its X-ray emission) and early on were also seen to be powerful sources of radio energy. But as we learned more we found that radio-loud quasars
THESE rare and entrancing sights each shows an epic cosmic event: the merging of galaxies.
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These are unusual images since collisions, which drastically alter the appearance and composition of galaxies, are rare. The changes accelerate the birth of new stars during the merger as molecular clouds fall to the centre of each galaxy, where they collide with other molecular clouds, causing them to condense into new stars.
The exceptional resolution of the Hubble telescope can capture such changes, and home in on some of the features in the star clusters, such as ones that look like knots (actually, these are numerous compact young star clusters).
The Beginning to the End of the Universe: Our solar system s origins astronomy.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from astronomy.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.