What has the Hubble telescope discovered?

what has the hubble telescope discovered of the universe

The Hubble Space Telescope is a device capable of obtaining high-quality images without taking into account the limitations of being on the outer edges of the last stage of our planet's atmosphere. Since its creation, there are many people who want to know what has the hubble telescope discovered to be so famous.

For this reason, in this article we are going to dedicate a summary of what the Hubble telescope has discovered and what its main characteristics are.

Hubble Telescope Features

What has the hubble telescope discovered?

The telescope is located at the outer edge of the atmosphere. The orbit where it is located is 593 kilometers above sea level. It only takes about 97 minutes to orbit the Earth. It was first put into orbit on April 24, 1990 to obtain better images at higher resolution.

Among its dimensions we find it with weighing about 11.000 kg, cylindrical in shape, 4,2 m in diameter and 13,2 m long. As you can see, it's a pretty big telescope, but it can float in the atmosphere without gravity.

The Hubble Space Telescope is able to reflect the light that reaches it thanks to its two mirrors. The mirror is also huge. One of them is 2,4 meters in diameter. It is ideal for sky exploration as it contains three integrated cameras and several spectrometers. The cameras are divided into several functions. One is to take pictures of the smallest places in the space it is based on because of their brightness in the distance. Thus they try to discover new points in space and better build complete maps.

Another camera is used to photograph the planets and get more information about them. The latter is used to detect radiation and take pictures even in the dark because it works through infrared. Thanks to renewable energies, the telescope can last a long time.

What has the Hubble telescope discovered?

black hole

the age of the universe

Astronomers use two methods to calculate the age of the universe: looking at the oldest stars and measuring the expansion of the universe. Today it is estimated that the universe has existed for about 13.700 billion years, and the Hubble telescope is the key to identifying it. Thanks to a series of images that the telescope has taken since 1995, called "deep field", astronomers have been able to "look back in time", as Díaz says, and understand what galaxies looked like when they originated, as if were were the universe of fossils.

One of the images, dubbed Hubble's "Ultra Deep Field," was taken in 2012 and revealed the most distant and oldest galaxies ever observed. Because of their distance and the time it takes for their light to reach us, scientists estimate that the images show galaxies in the universe that are only about 800 million years old.

The mysterious dark energy and the expansion of the universe

Our universe is constantly expanding, a phenomenon known as the "Hubble constant." For a long time, cosmologists have debated whether this expansion will slow down or stop at some point in the universe.

However, the Hubble images show that the opposite is actually happening. By observing increasingly distant and faint exploding stars, called supernovae, billions of light-years away, telescopes have shown that the universe is expanding infinitely and at an ever-increasing rate.

It's like watching the light of a candle, the darker the flame is seen, the further away the candle is inferred. The reason for this constant expansion is the presence of so-called dark energy, a mysterious force about which we know very little, but whose antigravity effects are evident.

Dark matter

galaxies

Dark matter is another great mystery of science. Contrary to what we can see and touch, dark matter is a structure that stretches like an invisible fabric between objects in the universe.

Although invisible, astronomers can still notice the effects of dark matter by looking at how light passing through distant galaxies is distorted. This phenomenon is called "gravitational lensing.". Gravitational lensing shows how light bends when it collides with massive objects like galaxies, but dark matter also causes light to "bend."

Hubble's powerful vision has been able to detect these gravitational lenses around galaxy clusters. Because of this distortion of light displayed by Hubble, astronomers can perform calculations and infer the location and type of visible and invisible matter that makes up the observed region.

Black hole

With the help of Hubble it can be verified that almost all galaxies have black holes in their center. The telescope was able to show the first images of the gas surrounding a black hole and, from there, infer its mass and better understand how it was created.

A few weeks ago, it also successfully detected an intermediate-mass black hole, a hard-to-find type. Hubble was able to capture his presence because it captured the exact moment a star very close to him was swallowed, an event astronomers compared to a "cosmic murder."

Intermediate-mass black holes are the missing link in the evolution of the universe that researchers have long sought.

Pillars of Creation

Possibly the most famous image ever taken by Hubble, the "Pillars of Creation" was first taken in 1995. The level of detail in these types of images cannot be achieved with ground-based telescopes.

This image shows a region of the Eagle Nebula, a massive star-forming region 6.500 light-years from Earth. The "Pillars of Creation" show dense material that has not been destroyed by radiation, allowing us to see all the gas and dust left floating in space after the birth of celestial bodies, such as stars.

The colors in the image highlight the emissions of various chemical elements. Oxygen is blue, sulfur is orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen are green.

a creepy face

In 2019, Hubble took a bizarre photo of what looked like an alien face… so much so that NASA released it as a Halloween wink. However, there is nothing supernatural about that photo. What it really shows is a head-on collision between two galaxies. The eyes, noses and mouths of the 'aliens' they were made up of disks of dust and gas created by colliding galaxies.

I hope that with this information you can learn more about what the Hubble telescope has discovered.


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