BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Hubble Space Telescope - 27th birthday Aptil 2017

Thank you, Angie, and all the best to you for Christmas and the year to come.

Inspired by Hubble photos, Luca Pierro has created "Chasing Stars". He's superimposed a nebula onto his own profile and it's amazingly effective.

The Hubble Space Telescope was a fantastic project. Unfortunately, an error was introduced into its mirror as it was polished. The budget didn't include any testing, so the faulty mirror was on the telescope when it was launched. Fortunately, using the space shuttle, it was possible to make repairs to the telescope. In December 1993 the optics were corrected and a new camera installed. And on January 13, 1994 new photos were released.

Here are comparison images for the spiral galaxy M100. There are two raw images that show the before and after. On the left is the image taken before the servicing mission. The effects of optical aberration in HST's 2.4-meter primary mirror blur starlight, smear out fine detail, and limit the telescope's ability to see faint structure. On the right we see the results of the modified optics in which the telescope can cleanly resolve faint structure as small as 30 light years across in a galaxy tens of millions of light years away.

"Deep Space", a painting by Nusa Stromsek. Inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Thanks for sharing, Mona.

So hard to believe it has been 25 years since I first heard of the Hubble.

Most galaxies have a spiral or elliptical structure, but about a quarter of them are irregular. Here is an example from the Hubble Space Telescope: NGC 5408. It was discovered by 1834 by John Herschel and long thought to be a planetary nebula. But it turns out to be a galaxy about 16 million light years away in the constellation Centaurus. It contains the “ultraluminous” X-ray source NGC 5408-A, which may be an intermediate-mass black hole.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

This beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 5584 has played a key role in a new study that measures the expansion rate of the Universe to greater accuracy than ever before. Hubble can show individual stars in the galaxy, some of which are Cepheid variables, stars whose light varies in a way that we can calculate how far away they are. By studying many Cepheids in several galaxies the team has been able to refine our knowledge of this expansion rate, expressed as a number known as Hubble’s constant, to an accuracy of 3.3 percent.

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (STScI/JHU), L. Macri (Texas A & M University), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Like the fury of a raging sea, this anniversary image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a bubbly ocean of glowing hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur gas in the extremely massive and luminous molecular nebula Messier 17. This is the Swan Nebula stellar nursery located about 5500 light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation. The wave-like patterns of gas have been sculpted and illuminated by a torrent of ultraviolet radiation from young, massive stars (which lie outside the picture to the upper left). The ultraviolet radiation is carving and heating the surfaces of cold hydrogen gas clouds. The warmed surfaces glow orange and red in this image. The image is roughly 3 light-years across. The colours in the image represent various gases. Red represents sulphur; green, hydrogen; and blue, oxygen.

(Credit: European Space Agency, NASA, and J. Hester (Arizona State University))

NGC 1487 is a peculiar galaxy, some 30 million light years away in the constellation of Eridanus. It's peculiar because it's actually some old galaxies merging into a new galaxy. The original galaxies have lost their shapes, and stars and gas have been thrown out in the interaction.

There are older yellow and red stars in the outer regions, but the blue - large areas of bright blue stars - are more noticeable. These are hot young stars that probably formed when the galactic merger triggered new star formation.

(Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA)