30 years of stunning photos show why NASA fought so hard to save the Hubble telescope businessinsider.co.za - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from businessinsider.co.za Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“This is a great discovery!” said ESO team member Themiya Nanayakkara in fall of 2018 about the discovery that almost all of the sky is invisibly glowing with Lyman-alpha emission from the early Universe. “Next time you look at the moonless night sky and see the stars, imagine the unseen glow of hydrogen: the first building block of the universe, illuminating the whole night sky.”
Lyman-alpha Emission –“
First Building Block of the Universe”
An unexpected abundance of Lyman-alpha emission that covers nearly the entire field of view in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) region was discovered by an international team of astronomers using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).
“Hubble isn’t just a satellite; it’s about humanity’s quest for knowledge,” said astronaut and former NASA Chief Scientist, John M. Grunsfeld about the iconic space telescope. Looking at Hubble’s ground-breaking “Deep Field” images that show the most distant galaxies that can be observed in visible light leaves us feeling like something else is going about its business out there.
Transformed Our View of Where We Are
“We are born into the world like actors who are placed on a stage without a script. The Hubble Space Telescope has transformed our understanding of that stage,” wrote Harvard astronomer, Avi Loeb in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “From discovering four moons around Pluto to gorgeous images of the delivery rooms of young stars and planets, to the accelerated expansion of the universe at large, this telescope transformed our view of where we are to the realm of the magnificent.”
July 24, 2020 at 5:00 pm
The question of how the Universe began is something each of us has wondered at some point, but how will everything end? What will happen to the stars, the planets and the galaxies?
Advertisement
What will happen to the supermassive black holes and spinning neutron stars? What will happen at the end of the Universe?
Astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack has been contemplating this a lot over the past few years and her new book
We got the chance to speak to Katie to find out the latest theories on the subject and what it means to contemplate the end of the Universe.
January 31, 2021
Astronomers announced this month that a new deep-field survey called JADES will be carried out with the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s much-anticipated successor. The Webb is due to launch later this year.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (in its eXtreme version) is the deepest view of the universe yet obtained … and will be, until JADES takes over. It stretches approximately 13 billion light-years and includes approximately 10,000 galaxies. It took 11.3 days for the Hubble Space Telescope to collect these ancient photons. Try downloading the largest version and zoom in on different sections. We’re seeing these galaxies as they were billions of years ago. How might they look today? Image via NASA/ ESA/ S. Beckwith (STSci)/ HUDF team.