Today, April 28th, is International Astronomy Day. If you’re an enthusiast of heavenly bodies, peering at the stars, black holes, and other celestial phenomena, then now is the perfect time to celebrate. Have a party, look through a telescope at the night sky, convince yourself you’ve discovered a new astral occurrence, call NASA with your discovery, get into an argument with the guy on the other end of the phone, insist that you did indeed discover it, argue that Copernicus was a fraud, use a lot of swear words, then pass out on your roof deck, surly and resolute, happy to have celebrated properly.
Or, if drunken arguments aren’t your beat, then perhaps enjoy the world of wonderment uncovered by the Hubble Space Telescope as described below.
Check Out: The Hubble Telescope Breaks Its Own Distance Record
The Hubble Space Telescope – referred to in the scientific community as the HST, but more colloquially known at merely The Hubble, was first launched into low Earth orbit on April 24th, 1990. 26 years on, it has peered more deeply into space than any other tool conceived of by humanity, recently having caught light from a galaxy – nicknamed GV-z11, but more familiarly known as Groucho, a fact we just made up – that was illuminated 13.4 billion years in the past. To put that into perspective, that was when the universe was only 3% of its current age.
Saturn From 1996 to 2000: As Saturn takes its 29-year journey around the Sun, its tilt allows us to see its rings from different perspectives. Saturn’s tilt also gives it seasons. The lowest image on the left shows the northern hemisphere’s autumn, while the uppermost right image shows the winter. Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
Indeed, the Hubble has captured impressive image after impressive image of our great, wonderful cosmos. In 1990, it sent Earth some amazing images of Saturn, which revealed the exact look and configuration of its rings.To use the proper terminology, the pictures showed off the Encke Division and the Cassini Division. In 1991, the Hubble gave us the very first color photos of Jupiter. In 1992, it showed off a star cluster that was more or less the early formation of a star system, something we had never seen before. In 1995, the Hubble captured the below image, one of its most iconic, of newborn stars emerging from their gaseous formation pockets, called “eggs” by NASA.
The Majestic Sombrero Galaxy (M104): This galaxy’s hallmark is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
1999, the Hubble saw a super-dense cluster of stars 28,000 light years from Earth that was the densest globule of stars yet observed. 2002 saw a dense cosmic “ghost,” a nebula surrounding a small dying star. The following year, it saw a new galaxy, called the Sombrero Galaxy because of its disc shape. In 2006, it watched two galaxies merge. In 2006, it managed to look at a galaxy 30,000 lightyears away. In 2013, the Hubble saw a very strange hourglass-shaped object whose rotation was perpendicular to that of our ordinary galaxy. This object hasn’t been identified, and scientists don’t yet know what it’s odd rotation means or denotes.
Bipolar Planetary Nebula PN Hb 12: The striking shape of this nebula, reminiscent of a butterfly or an hourglass, was formed as a Sun-like star approached the end of its life and puffed its outer layers into the surrounding space. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Zijlstra (The University of Manchester).
A full gallery of these things can be found at HubbleSite.org, and it warrants a look. the Hubble has given the Earth a wondrous view of this vast cosmic sea we’re floating in. For those who look out at the vastness of space and feel small and significant, consider this: However small we are, we’re still a part of all that. Humility? Oh, a tad.
Top Image: Public Domain, photograph by NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar Observatory. Science team: D. Soderblom and E. Nelan (STScI), F. Benedict and B. Arthur (U. Texas), and B. Jones (Lick Obs.)
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
