The Hubble Space Telescope it was the tool that would definitively change the way in which we humans can observe outer space.
For its time, it was considered the largest and most sensitive telescope ever built, and would be capable of making colossal advances in the observation of objects located inside and outside our galaxy.
The Hubble telescope was launched into orbit on April 24, 1990, thanks to an unprecedented joint effort between NASA and The European Space Agency. Hubble would be the first of several space telescopes currently orbiting our planet that have managed to take hundreds of thousands of images of space objects in truly amazing detail.
Due to its incalculable value in modern astronomical studies, the Hubble telescope was named in honor Edwin hubble, one of the most important astronomers of the XNUMXth century, recognized for discovering space elements beyond the Milky Way, including the Andromeda galaxy, hundreds of stars, nebulae and asteroids.
If you are a fan of astronomical observation, you will not want to miss this article, where we talk about everything you need to know about the Hubble telescope and we also show you the best images of its findings.
The Hubble Telescope has made it possible to closely observe the most fascinating nebulae, such as the Pistol Nebula, the Eagle Nebula and the Sombrero Nebula. Do not miss our specialized article on Nebulae and their relationship with the birth of new stars.
What is the Hubble telescope?
Hubble is a long-range space telescope, that is, a space observation device that has been placed in Earth orbit, approximately 600 kilometers above sea level.
Hubble was the first step in the space observation plan Great Observatories, a NASA program that would finally put 4 of today's most powerful space telescopes outside Earth's atmosphere: Hubble, the Gamma-Ray Space Observatory, the Chandra X-Ray Telescope, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
The hubble telescope is located under the shadow blanket that the earth projects, to enjoy the ideal conditions with which it can receive the light of millions of objects inside and outside our galaxy with greater ease (something that cannot be achieved from La Land).
On the other hand, being outside the Earth's atmosphere, the telescope lens is not affected by the variations of our atmospheric turbulence, created by the electromagnetic waves emitted by our planet and that can affect the capture and processing of Gamma Ray radiation and X-rays produced by distant stars, especially when looking in the infrared spectrum.
Finally, the space telescope lens is also freed from meteorological limitations associated with Earth's atmosphere such as interior light pollution and cloud build-up.
Where is the hubble telescope?
Hubble is currently in geocentric orbit, at an average altitude of 547 km above sea level.
The Hubble telescope is not static in an orbital point, on the contrary, it moves at an average speed of about 7 km/s to always locate itself in the orbital points that are covered by the shadow cast by the Earth, from where it can Obtain images without light pollution.
Technical characteristics of the Hubble telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope is a true giant of telescopes. It has a body with 13.24 meters in length and a diameter of 4 meters at its thickest point. With all its additional equipment, the hubble has a total weight of an amazing 11.000 kilograms.
It has a colossal lens with two mirrors, one 2 meters in diameter and the other 4. The telescope lens is capable of capturing, with optical focus, images located millions of kilometers away. In addition, it is capable of capturing images with an optical resolution of 0.04 seconds of arc.
Optical resolution refers to the power of a telescope lens to separate different objects within the same image that could be confused by the diffraction effect of light that has traveled light years away.
In addition to its powerful lens, the Hubble Telescope is equipped with a variety of special instruments that are capable of scanning space for electromagnetic or radioactive traces.
How does the Hubble telescope work?
Main instruments:
Multi-Object Infrared Camera and Spectrometer (NICMOS)
It was installed on the telescope during a Hubble servicing mission in 1997 and is designed to image the near-infrared space spectrum (several light-years).
This equipment is capable of capturing in contrast the energetic emissions of ionized particles, mainly in gaseous stars and in accumulations of emission nebulae.
One of the first discoveries made thanks to the NICMOS of the Hubble telescope, was the gun nebula, a hyperaccumulation of cosmic gas that surrounds the star Gun, a blue hypergiant star, undoubtedly one of the brightest in our galaxy.
Later, the spectrometer's data processor was modified to obtain images that would allow studying the atmosphere of 4 exoplanets discovered more than 130 light-years from our system, with conditions similar to those on Earth.
Advanced Camera for Space Surveys (ACS)
The ACS was an upgrade made to the telescope during servicing mission 3B in March 2002. In fact, the Advanced Camera for Space Survey was the equipment that supplanted the original instrument from 1990: the Faint Object Camera (FOC).
Although currently partially out of service, the ACS quickly became the Hubble main observing team thanks to its amazing versatility.
First of all, it has several independent detectors that cover all sectors of the space electromagnetic spectrum, so it can take images with ultraviolet and infrared contrast at the same time.
It also has a large quantum efficiency detection area and a variety of filters that allow you to capture different types of very distant space objects such as nebulae, comets, asteroids, planets and stars of all kinds.
The ACS has probably been the most important space observation object in history so far. Thanks to its extremely high sensitivity, we have been able to obtain images of the universe that were previously thought impossible, including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
A photograph taken at the "birth" of the universe, since the lens was able to capture a trace of light older than any record, emitted 13.000 million years ago. Thanks to this photograph, we have been able to calculate the estimated age of the creation of the universe.
Wide Angle Camera 3 (WFC3)
The WFC3 camera was the replacement for WFC2, a team that reached its useful life in Hubble for the year 2008.
The WFC3 Camera was a substantial improvement in Hubble's ability to capture images in the visible spectrum, thanks to its UV detection sensors, which can provide color images with a resolution of 2048 x 4096 pixels.
Since the installation of Wide Angle 3 at Hubble, the quality of detail in important captures, such as the birth of a new star in the Carina Nebula in 2012, has been greatly improved.
The captured image shows the exact moment of hyper-condensation of cosmic gas particles, until they are dense enough to form a star.
Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS)
One of the latest upgrades to Hubble occurred in 2009, during the B4 servicing mission, when NASA installed the COS on the telescope.
The COS is designed for spectrography in the ultraviolet range of space. This instrument is capable of perceiving the traces of electromagnetic radiation in a very sensitive way, which is why it has yielded a lot of information regarding the process of formation of new large-scale galaxies and nebulae.
The COS has helped answer some of the most important questions in modern astronomy such as:
- How is the process of formation of galaxies?
- Observation on the different types of halos of galaxies
- How do stars form from accumulations of cosmic gases?
- Study on the atmospheres of planets inside and outside our solar system.
- Study of the chemical composition of cosmic events such as supernovae
5 Discoveries Made Thanks to Hubble Telescope Photos
The scientific community in the 90's knew very well that the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope would completely and forever change the rules of astronomical observation, but what they did not know was the scope of the discoveries that would be achieved thanks to the power of its lens. .
Thanks to the high resolution of the hubble telescope images, we have been able to understand universal mechanics like never before and observe some of the most incredible natural phenomena in our universe; like the death of the stars.
Here you have 5 scientific discoveries achieved thanks to the images of the Hubble telescope
Black holes and cosmic homicide
Although the existence of black holes had been proposed since the mid-1990th century, we were not able to prove it until after XNUMX, thanks to the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Because they absorb light from their surroundings, black holes are virtually impossible to detect with telescopes on Earth, so it was Hubble that detected the first really clear images of a black hole.
This happens because the telescope's lens is capable of capturing the radiation emissions projected by the accumulations of ionized gases that agglomerate around the powerful gravitational center of black holes.
In fact, from his years of observation, we learned that most spiral galaxies are dominated by supermassive black holes at their centers. In our case, the Milky Way revolves around a huge supermassive black hole called Sagittarius a.
Finally, the Hubble telescope images have managed to capture in detail one of the most interesting cosmic events related to the mechanics of black holes: a black hole devouring a neutron star. An event astronomers have called cosmic homicide.
Confirmation of the cosmic inflation model
The study of cosmic phenomena that can only be observed by telescopes such as Hubble, has allowed the scientific community to obtain evidence on what until years ago was just a theory: our universe is constantly expanding.
The recurrent observation of supernovae, like the one described in the image, has shown that they are increasingly distant from our planet, which means that the universe has not stopped expanding since the Big Bang 13.000 million years ago.
Coincidentally, the first person to propose that the theory that all galactic elements are constantly moving away from each other due to the expansion of the space-time field was Edwin Hubble, in what is now known as Hubble theory.
It is a remarkable coincidence that the first findings capable of verifying the Hubble theory have been collected by the telescope that also bears his name.
existence of dark matter
If we talk about dark matter very extensively, we would be getting into muddy ground, since this is currently one of the most discussed topics in astronomy and the truth is that there is very little data about it to understand its nature or purpose in the universe. space.
The presumption of the existence of a misunderstood particle that escaped observations throughout the electromagnetic spectrum is not new. In fact, the term "dark matter" It was coined in 1933 by the Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky.
However, it was thanks to the photos of the Hubble telescope that the existence of the mysterious dark matter particle could finally be confirmed, since its ultra-sensitive lens managed to perceive the subtle deformations of light emissions in the visible spectrum of space.
A visual effect similar to the warping of light when it collides with particles of matter. This cosmic effect is known as gravitational lens.
Dark matter is thought to function as an "invisible" tissue, capable of holding together cosmic portions that are not governed by the gravitational fields of the particles.
For example, it is thought that the galactic mega cluster Abell 2029, which brings together thousands of galaxies in a range of several million light years, is "wrapped" in a coating of dark matter that holds it together. This theory can be confirmed by looking at the distortions in light caused by gravitational lensing when looking at Abell 2029.
A look at the origins of the universe
Probably the most important finding made by the lens of the Hubble Telescope is the image we know today as the hubble ultra deep space
This controversial image was taken following the oldest visible light trail on record. The light projection in the image was emitted by hundreds of millions of stars more than 13.000 billion years ago, during the expansion stages of the universe after the Big Bang.
To achieve this image, all the visualization instruments of the Hubble Telescope were used, with the intention of collecting visual information of all the variables of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The ultra-deep field is as if Hubble could make us look into the past, perceiving light emissions from galaxies born in the early stages of creation, between 600 and 800 years after the Big Bang.
This image greatly helped to better understand the process of formation of galaxies and stars after the cooling of matter.
Discovery of the pillars of creation
Hubble has discovered hundreds of interesting cosmic objects, but few of them have drawn as much attention as "the pillars of creation," part of an emission nebula cataloged as the H II region.
The Pillars of Creation is a cosmic object discovered within a segment of the Eagle Nebula (also discovered by Hubble), but what is interesting about this H II region is the incredible rate of new star birth that occurs as a result. of the enormous amount of hydrogen particles present in cosmic gases.
Of the three columns of dense gas visible in the image, the largest measures a total of 9.5 light-years across, making it truly colossal. It is believed that this area is inhabited by more than 8500 stars, which would make it the cosmic region with the highest population density of stars known in space.
The constant observations to the pillars of creation They have allowed a better understanding of the material recycling system that occurs in space, when supernovae expel particles, which are then condensed within cosmic gas clouds due to the effect of their gravitational fields, where they become part of new celestial bodies.