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The “Pillars of Creation” is one of the most famous images taken by Hubble.
It was designed to last 15 years, but this April 24 the Hubble Space Telescope celebrated three decades of orbiting Earth and sending several of the most iconic images of our universe.
During that time it has served as a time machine spying on places innermost parts of the cosmos.
- The mysterious composition of the first comet that visits us from another solar system
Thanks to their observations, astronomers have seen the birth of stars and the creation of black holes. It has also captured Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot, moons, and objects beyond the solar system.
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NASA / ESA
Hubble has been on Earth since 1990.
Hubble is also the author of the photograph. “deeper“ of the universe.
These images were originally in black and white, but scientists use various filters that allow certain parts of the light to pass through to differentiate the objects that emit this light and assign colors to them, according to Rosa Mundo, an astrophysicist at the Instituto de Ciencia del Space Telescope, the NASA allied entity in charge of the Hubble operation.
NASA / ESA
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95 minutes it takes the telescope to go around Earth
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13meters is its length, similar to a school bus
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547km is the height at which it orbits the Earth
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To celebrate Hubble’s birthday, on BBC Mundo we show you five of the findings more important of astronomy that have been achieved with the contribution of the powerful telescope.
1. The age of the universe
Astronomers calculate the age of the universe using two methods: observing the oldest stars and measuring the expansion of the universe.
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Today it is estimated that the universe has existed for some 13,700 million years and Hubble has been key in determining this.
Thanks to a series of photographs that the telescope took since 1995, called the “deep fields”, astronomers were able to take a “look at the past”, as Díaz calls it, and see what galaxies were like at their origins, as if they were cosmic fossils.
One of these images, known as the “campo orltrapdeep“ from hubbleTaken in 2012, it revealed the oldest and most distant galaxies ever observed.
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NASA / ESA
Hubble’s “deep fields” are images of the remotest parts of the universe.
Due to their remoteness and the time it takes for light to reach us, scientists estimate that these images show galaxies when the universe was only about 800 million years old.
- What shows the deepest image of the universe never seen before
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AFP
This is the Sombrero Galaxy, photographed by Hubble in 2003. It is located 28 million light years from Earth. It was named Sombrero, in Spanish, because it looks like the brim of a Mexican hat.
2 The mysterious dark energy and the expansion of the universe
Our universe is constantly expanding, a phenomenon known as the “cOngoing from Hubble. ”
For a long time, cosmologists debated whether that expansion would slow down or would stop somewhere in the universe.
The Hubble footage, however, showed that what is actually happening is fair. otherwise.
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Hubble heritage
By observing supernovae, Hubble has been able to verify the infinite expansion of the universe.
By observing bursts of stars, called supernovaeIncreasingly faraway and faint billions of light years away, the telescope has shown that the universe expands infinitely and at ever increasing speed.
It is as if the light of a candle is observed, the dimmer the flame is, it is inferred that the candle is further away.
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NASA / ESA
Hubble offers more detail than a terrestrial telescope provides.
This constant expansion is explained by the presence of the call dark energy, a mysterious force of which we know very little, but of which its effects defying gravity are noticeable.
3. Dark matter
Dark matter is another of the great enigmas of science.
Contrary to things we can see and touch, dark matter is a structure that works like a telto invisible that extends between the objects of the cosmos.
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NASA / ESA
Thanks to gravitational lenses, Hubble can notice the presence of dark matter.
Although it cannot be seen, astronomers can notice the effects of dark matter by seeing how it is distort the light that spans distant galaxies. This phenomenon is called “gravitational lens”.
Gravitational lenses show how light is deflected by colliding with massive objects like galaxies, but also dark matter causes that light to “double“.
Hubble’s powerful vision has managed to detect those gravitational lenses around galaxy clusters.
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Hubble
Thanks to Hubble we know the great orange spot that characterizes Jupiter.
Thanks to that distortion of light that Hubble shows, astronomers can make calculations and deduce the location and type of matter, visible and invisible, which makes up the observed area.
4. Black holes
With Hubble it has been possible to verify that practically all galaxies have black holes at their center.
The telescope managed to show the first images of the gases surrounding a black hole and from there deduce its mass and better understand how they originate.
A few weeks ago he also managed to detect a intermediate mass black hole, a very difficult type to find.
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NASA / ESA
Hubble offers more detail than a terrestrial telescope provides.
30 years of Hubble: the “Pillars of Creation” and 4 other findings from the telescope that revolutionized what we know about our universe
Hubble was able to capture its existence as it captured the moment a star that had passed very close to it was swallowed, an event that astronomers compared to a “cosmic murder“.
- The ‘cosmic homicide’ with which a missing link in black holes was discovered
Intermediate mass black holes are a missing link in the evolution of the cosmos that researchers have long sought.
5. The “Pillars of Creation”
The “Pillars of Creation” is perhaps the most famous photo taken by Hubble, first captured in 1995. The Level of detail such images cannot be achieved with ground-based telescopes.
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NASA / ESA
Astronomers use light filters to color the images that Hubble takes.
The image shows a region of the Eagle Nebula, a vast area of star formation located at 6,500 light years from the earth.
The “Pillars of Creation” show dense material that has not yet been destroyed by the radiation, which allows to see all the gases and dust that remains floating in space after the birth of a celestial body, like the stars.
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NASA / ESA
Hubble took this photo of Saturn in September 2019.
The colors of the image highlight the emission of various chemical elements. Oxygen is seen in blue, sulfur in orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen in green.
Bonus: a chilling face
In 2019, Hubble captured a curious image that looks like the face of a being alien… So much so that NASA published it on Halloween as a wink.
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NASA / ESA
This is the “alien” face that Hubble captured.
The image, however, has nothing of supernatural.
What it actually shows is the shock frontal between two galaxies. The eyes, nose and mouth of the “alien” are made up of disks of dust and gas from the colliding galaxies.
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