The Hubble Space Telescope is the first major telescope that was placed in space. It has been in operation for over twenty-five years, and has greatly changed our knowledge of the universe. It can observe galaxies and stars that are very far away since it is not blocked at all by light pollution and smog that obstructs the views of the telescopes on Earth. Hubble is fascinating because it was and still is the most revolutionary telescope since Galileo first looked through one over four hundred years ago. Hubble played a large role in helping scientists discover and learn about many things like dark matter and dark energy, the age of the universe, and gamma ray bursts. None of these discoveries would have been possible without Hubble’s unique view of the universe.
That the universe extended beyond the Milky Way was already widely surmised, and this discovery didn't change much. The revolution came when Hubble compared these newfound distances with the velocities of galaxies, which can be determined by measuring their color spectra. To his surprise, he found the two to be nearly linearly correlated, leading to the conclusion that every galaxy is receding from every other galaxy, and the universe as a whole is expanding.
Hubble’s revolutionary work includes finding a constant relationship between galaxies’ distance and redshift. This helped prove that the universe is expanding. He also created a classification system that was created for galaxies. The system he created is called the Hubble Sequence, which many researchers have used for the past decades.
1. The earth’s sun is a star, it generates heat and light through nuclear fusion.
The currently accepted model of the Big Bang is "that the the universe is not static but is expanding and that the expansion began in an incredibly hot, dense Big Bang approximately 13.72 billion years ago" (Krause, 2012, p. 25). This hot, dense bit of matter was only a few millimeters across and contained all of the matter and energy that makes up our universe and as it expanded, it cooled and over the billions of years of existence the universe settled into its current state.
There have been many theories concerning what the universe looks like, how it became this way, and where it is going. The most popular theory that people hold today is that the universe began when all the matter ever present in the universe was contained in a tiny speck and that spec exploded. This is known as the Big Bang. This theory has developed a great deal since it was first conceptualized and continues to evolve today. Many different scientists have had a hand in this.
Whether it was spending ÅÇrigid nights beneath the open observatory dome photographing nebulae¡¦(Parshall et al, 1998, p.PG) or forever challenging the concepts that he deemed unsubstantial, Hubble made it his lifelong ambition to ascertain as much information about the universeÃÔ vastness as he possibly could. Of all the monumental discoveries that were credited to HubbleÃÔ perseverance, one of the most important concerned the issue of receding galaxies. By all appearances, Hubble had stumbled onto the fact that ¡¦the cosmos was expanding, flying apart as if it has once been highly concentrated¡¦(Parshall et al, 1998 p.PG). Little did he know at the time, but his discovery would come to represent the big bang theory that has evolved as such a well-known concept within the worldÃÔ contemporary scientific society. Hubble was a US astronomer who studied extragalactic nebulae and demonstrated them to be galaxies like our own. He found the first evidence for the expansion of the Universe, in accordance with the cosmological theories of George Lema and Willem de Sitter, and his work led to an enormous expansion of our perception of the size of the Universe.
“I knew that even if i were second or third rate, it was astronomy that mattered.” Edwin Hubble (1889-1953)(Edwin) Edwin Hubble was born in Missouri in 1889. Due to the occupation held by his parent, an insurance executive, at just 9 years old he moved to Chicago.
Edwin Hubble discovering galaxies outside of our own Milky Way; He showed that these separate galaxies were moving away from each other by observing there redshifts. His observations led him to the discovery that the farther away a galaxy was from the Milky Way, the faster it was moving away from us. This is known as Hubble’s
This article written in the Astrobiology Magazine on August 1, 2015 describes the efforts of the teams of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Hubble Space Telescope in finding a planet that is similar to Jupiter in orbit size and distance from its star, but the size of Uranus. Both of the teams have made their confirmations of the Uranus-like plant, OGLE-2005-BLG-169Lb in the star system OGLE-2005-BLG-169 independently through the method of gravitational microlensing.
Astronomers believed the Universe was created about 14 billion years ago. During that time, the entire Universe was inside a bubble that was thousands of times smaller than a pinhead, and it was insanely hot and dense. Out of nowhere this little bubble started expanding. This expansion created what we know as the Universe. In such little time the Universe went from the size of an atom to the ginormous galaxy we have that is continuously growing.
As stated on nasa.gov, “Hubble has made more than 1.2 million observations since it’s missions began in 1990.” Hubble has also expanded astronomers knowledge about the universe and space as a whole. The most famous observation made by this telescope was that of galaxies beyond our own, Milky Way, and discovering that the universe is much larger than further predicted. Before this telescope, ground based telescopes could only see into our galaxy and could not reach any further. Therefore, it was thought that the Milky Way was the only galaxy included in space and the universe. Due to the fact, Hubble’s telescope, expands and allows for the study across a wider light spectrum, astronomers can see beyond further predicted. Another famous observation, studied by astronomers was that of the study of uncharted territories of the cosmos. As proposed on hubblesite.org, “It became increasingly clear to astronomers that Earth’s atmosphere distorted starlight, which made it difficult to obtain razor-sharp views of celestial objects. The idea of placing a telescope in space, above Earth’s turbulent air, had been kicked around for several years. But scientists pondered how to transport a telescope into space.” That was until, Hubble’s creation that displayed imagery of the cosmos. Once again it had accomplished a feat that had troubled ground based telescopes. In
The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most amazing machines in orbit right now. In 1946, an astrophysicist named Dr. Lyman Spitzer proposed that a telescope in space would reveal better and clearer images that are even far from earth than any ground telescope. This idea was very extravagant because no one had yet launched a rocket into outer space. As the US space program excelled quickly over the early years, Spitzer lobbied NASA and Congress to develop a space telescope. In 1975, the European Space Agency and NASA began to develop the telescope that would change astronomy for ever. In 1977, Congress approved funding for the development of the space telescope and NASA named Lockheed Martin Aerospace Company as the prime contractor
Before the Hubble was invented it was predicted the age of the universe to be around 10-20 billion years ago. However, since the creation of the Hubble Telescope the age of the universe is said to be approximately 13 to 14 billion years. Hubble has been crucial for astronomical research. It provides the necessary