Thought #28
June 2009
Author: Bill Thurston
The Hubble Space Telescope
What is the Hubble Space Telescope?
Hubble is a large telescope orbiting around the earth. It was launched April 24,
1990. It orbits 400 miles above the earth traveling at 17,500 mph and completes
a journey around the earth every 97 minutes. It is 43 feet long and weights over
12 tons. It is powered by two 25 foot solar panel that you can see in the
pictures below. Hubble has taken about 259,000 exposures.
Pictures of Hubble:
http://hubble.nasa.gov/hubble/full/img94.jpg
http://hubble.nasa.gov/hubble/full/img158.jpg
Where is the telescope now?
Current location:
http://hubble.nasa.gov/operations/tracking.php
Why is Hubble better than land based telescopes?
Land based telescopes have to look through the earth's atmosphere to see into
space. Earth's atmosphere distorts some light and blocks other types of light.
You have looked into the sky at night and seen stars twinkle. Well twinkling is
an atmospheric distortion because stars don't really twinkle. Can you imagine
what it would be like if our sun twinkled!
Hubble, as a space telescope, doesn't have to deal with these distortions
therefore providing
uniquely clear and deep views of the cosmos.
What has Hubble discovered?
The place where stars are born
Stars form in huge clouds of hydrogen gas. This picture shows the Eagle nebula,
in which stars are now being born. Millions of years from now the clouds seen
here will be gone. They will be eroded away by radiation and matter emanating
from the newborn stars. Our own Sun probably formed from a similar cloud about
4.6 billion years ago.
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/nebula/pr1995044a/web_print/an see stars
being born:
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/nebula/pr2002011b/web_print/
Dark Energy and Dark Matter
Most of the universe seems to consist of nothing we can see. Dark energy and
dark matter, detectable only because of their effect on the visible matter
around them, make up most of the universe. Hubble provided information to show
that Dark energy must exist.
For more information on dark energy:
http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/dark_energy/
Hubble looks deeper in space than ever before.
The Hubble telescope has provided mankind's deepest, most detailed visible view
of the universe. Hubble looked at a speck of the sky only about the width of a
dime 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is
considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space,
because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions.
Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at
least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution.
Here is what Hubble saw:
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/the_universe/pr2004007a/web_print/
Other Observations
This list is very long. It includes:
Seeing debris rings around other stars that show the birth of new planets.
Watching a comet crash into Jupiter.
Learning more about black holes.
Viewed Martian weather.
Observing stars dying in a puff or an explosion.
Observing colliding galaxies.
Discovering monstrous black holes (black holes are pieces of matter so dense
that light can't escape their gravity).
Add much more.
How does NASA create these great colored pictures?
First of all, all pictures coming back from Hubble are in black and white. Each
picture is composed of 48 separate pictures all looking at the same thing. Each
of the 48 pictures captures a different frequency of light. In the colored
pictures, color represents chemical elements. Red represents sulfur, blue
represents oxygen, and green represents hydrogen. After months of work, a single
colored picture is completed.
Eventually, Hubble's time will end. Hubble's components will slowly degrade to
the point at which the telescope stops working. A final command will shut down
the telescope and it will spiral to earth. It will land in the Pacific Ocean.
Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is currently in the
works. From its orbit 940,000 miles away from Earth (that's past the moon!) and
with 7.6 times the light gathering power as Hubble,
JWST will peer deeper into the universe
than ever before. It will also have the ability to find other places in the
universe where life as we know it could exist. It might be closer then you
think! The telescope is scheduled to launch in 2014.
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/
For even more study about Hubble, this is a good media guide:
http://hubble.nasa.gov/a_pdf/news/SM3A-MediaGuide.pdf
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