Who invented the hubble bubble

By looking beyond the Milky Way, it revealed a plethora of never-before-seen galaxies, including some of the most distant star systems ever discovered.

Recent images contain more than 5, galaxies, some of them as far as Since the light from these galaxies has taken eons to reach our solar system, it offers astronomers a window onto what the universe looked like only a short time after the Big Bang some Hubble's "Extreme Deep Field" image, The dazzling snaps of nebulae, supernovae and galaxies captured by Hubble are usually only released after having undergone a postproduction process to add color.

These are then overlaid to create a single color composite. Since Hubble can see in the ultraviolet and infrared ranges, scientists also occasionally insert additional color into the images to bring out details that would otherwise remain invisible to the human eye. The telescope also found the first evidence of supermassive black holes at the center of neighboring galaxies, and it has been vital in hunting down extrasolar planets that may have the proper conditions to foster life.

While there are no restrictions on who can apply, the competition is extremely tough. Three Type 1a supernovae imaged by the Hubble in Because Type 1a supernovae shine with a known brightness, their apparent brightness can be used to calculate their distances.

Before , astronomers assumed that the expansion rate of the universe must be decreasing. This made sense: The gravitational force exerted by the mass in the universe would be pulling on itself, slowing the expansion of space over time. To measure this deceleration, two teams of astronomers embarked on studies to measure the brightness and redshift of distant supernovae. Combined with other studies, these data could be used to determine the change in the expansion rate of the universe over time.

But when they analyzed the data, the astronomers were astounded to discover that the universe is actually expanding at an increasing rate. They reasoned that the source of this unexpected acceleration, which they called dark energy, must oppose gravity. This Hubble telescope snapshot reveals clusters of infant stars that formed in a ring around the core of the barred-spiral galaxy NGC Two teams of astronomers—the High-z Supernova Search Team, led by Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt, and the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter—publish findings that, instead of slowing down, the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Astronomers using the Hubble telescope obtained the sharpest view yet of a glowing loop of gas called the Ring Nebula M57 , first cataloged more than years ago by French astronomer Charles Messier.

Spiral galaxy NGC , imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, is one of 18 galaxies whose distance was determined based on patterns of brightening and dimming of Cepheid variable stars within the galaxy. At million light-years away, NGC was the most distant galaxy in the study.

Credit: Jeffrey Newman Univ. This shows the relationship between the distance to a galaxy and its apparent speed away from the Milky Way. The Hubble constant is the slope of the line connecting the points. In the mids, Edwin Hubble recognized that the farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it appears to be moving away from us. This correlation between distance and apparent velocity shows that the universe is expanding, and is primary evidence for the big bang theory.

However, because of the difficulty of measuring precise distances to galaxies, the exact rate of expansion—the Hubble constant H 0 —remained uncertain. Without H 0 , it is impossible to determine how long the universe has been expanding, and thus how old it is. With its powerful optics and position above the blurring effects of the atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope was uniquely suited for determining galactic distances. By correlating the distances of 18 galaxies to their apparent speeds, astronomers successfully narrowed the expansion rate down to an uncertainty of just 10 percent.

The new constant tightened the possible age of the universe from 10 to 20 billion to 12 to 14 billion years old. Based on further refinements, we now think the universe is about Astronomers using the Hubble telescope take the sharpest views yet of the Red Planet during its closest approach to Earth in eight years. Dark sand dunes that surround the polar cap merge into a large, dark region called Acidalia.

This area is composed of dark, sand-sized grains of pulverized volcanic rock. The Chandra X-ray Observatory and its upper stage were photographed during separation from the space shuttle Columbia. Analysis of this image led to the first direct proof of dark matter. Hot gas detected by Chandra pink shows a bullet-shaped clump on the right, which passed through the hot gas from the other larger cluster during a collision.

Chandra passes more than a third of the way to the Moon before returning approximately 9, miles 16, kilometers away from Earth, allowing it to observe up to 55 hours. Riccardo Giacconi and Dr. Designed to detect X-ray emission from hot and energetic regions of the universe, Chandra has observed planets and comets, quasars, supernova remnants, and, most notably, discovered black holes.

The observatory also made a major advance in the study of dark matter by tracing the separation of dark matter from normal matter in collisions between galaxy clusters. It also contributes to research on the nature of dark energy. The Space Shuttle Discovery's cargo bay and the Earth's horizon are reflected in the helmet visor of an astronaut. Astronauts C. Nebula NGC , the first image taken after the servicing mission, shows a disk of material embellished with a ring of comet-shaped objects, with their tails streaming away from the central, dying star.

Hubble first viewed Abell in Scientists who analyzed that black-and-white picture discovered more than 50 remote, young galaxies.

In November , Hubble went into safe mode after four of its six gyroscopes failed. As a result, NASA prioritized this servicing mission, sending astronauts on the space shuttle Discovery to replace all six gyroscopes, which accurately point the telescope at celestial targets. Six days and three six-hour spacewalks later, the crew successfully replaced worn or outdated equipment, and performed several critical maintenance upgrades.

They installed a computer that was 20 times faster than its predecessor and a digital data recorder that stored 10 times as much data. The crew also added an electronics enhancement kit, battery improvement kits, and new outer layers of thermal protection. Hubble was practically new. Astronomers pointed Hubble at two targets, NGC and Abell , which gave scientists a clear view of a planetary nebula, as well as the first detailed look at the internal structure of a cluster of galaxies.

A star 40 times more massive than the Sun is blowing a giant bubble of material into space. The beefy star [lower center], embedded in the bright blue bubble, is so hot that it is quickly shedding material into space.

The dense gas surrounding the star is shaping the castoff material into a bubble. In the telescope's first ten years in orbit Hubble scientists studied 13, objects and made , individual observations resulting in over 2, scientific papers. Astronomers have looked for vast quantities of hydrogen that were cooked up in the Big Bang but somehow managed to disappear in the empty blackness of space.

This gas accounts for nearly half of the "normal" matter in the universe -- the rest is locked up in galaxies. The confirmation of this missing hydrogen will shed new light on the large-scale structure of the universe. The detection also confirms fundamental models of how so much hydrogen was manufactured in the first few minutes of the universe's birth in the Big Bang. Nearby active galaxy, Circinus, belongs to a class of mostly spiral galaxies called Seyferts, which have compact centers and are believed to contain massive black holes.

An interstellar cloud is caught in the process of destruction by strong radiation from a nearby hot star. The cloud, Barnard's Merope Nebula, is illuminated by light from the bright star Merope. Hubble Space Telescope detects sodium in the atmosphere of a hot-Jupiter orbiting a star light-years from Earth.

Credit: G. Their goal: analyzing the colors of light given off by the star and measuring slight changes in the brightness of each color as the planet passed in front of the star. Atoms and molecules in the planet's atmosphere should absorb specific colors, leaving gaps in the light spectrum and providing evidence for the composition of the atmosphere.

In November , astronomers reported success: The spectrum of starlight passing through the atmosphere of HD showed clear evidence for sodium—the first direct measurement of an atmosphere outside our solar system. The discovery showed that it is possible to detect extremely subtle differences in light, and analyze the atmospheres of planets in star systems hundreds of trillions of miles away. The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most photographed objects in the sky. The horsehead is a cold, dark cloud of gas and dust, silhouetted against the bright nebula, IC Planet formation is a hazardous process.

Pictures from the Hubble telescope are giving astronomers the first direct visual evidence for the growth of planetary "building blocks" inside the dusty disks of young stars in the Orion Nebula, a giant "star factory" near Earth.

But these snapshots also reveal that the disks are being "blowtorched" by a blistering flood of ultraviolet radiation from the region's brightest star, making planet formation extremely difficult. The Hubble telescope has captured an image of an unusual edge-on galaxy, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disk and showing how colliding galaxies spawn the formation of new generations of stars. Most spiral galaxies have arms of gas and stars that trail behind as they turn.

But this galaxy, called NGC , appears to have two "leading" outer arms that point toward the direction of the galaxy's clockwise rotation. To add to the conundrum, NGC also has a "trailing" inner arm that is wrapped around the galaxy in the opposite direction it is rotating. An interaction with another galaxy may have caused the clockwise rotation. Astronaut James H.

After five days of services and upgrades, the Columbia crew photographed the telescope returning to its routine. The servicing mission lasted almost 11 days. Ford JHU , G. These galaxies will eventually merge. The first stunning ACS images were released in April. An unexpected benefit of the image of the Tadpole Galaxy was the enormous number of galaxies seen in the background, which gave it an appearance similar to the galaxy-filled Hubble Deep Field image taken in However, the ACS picture was taken in one-twelfth the time.

The new solar arrays generated 27 percent more electrical power than the previous arrays, which doubled the electrical power that can be allocated to the scientific instruments on Hubble. The cooling unit, which allowed NICMOS to resume operations after three years, enabled it to send images of galaxies in several stages of development, demonstrating its powerful new capability to make remarkable discoveries unique to space-based near-infrared astronomy.

ACS has a tenfold increase in efficiency and delivers a panoramic crispness comparable to that of a wide-screen IMAX movie. This spiral galaxy is unlike the textbook images of stately galaxies. Its distorted shape was caused by a small interloper, a very blue, compact galaxy visible in the upper left corner of the more massive Tadpole.

The Tadpole resides about million light-years away in the constellation Draco. Multiple observations made over several months with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope captured the spectacle of matter and antimatter propelled to near the speed of light by the Crab pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star the size of Manhattan.

An international team of astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to help make a precise measurement of the mass of a planet outside our solar system. The planet, called Gliese b, is 1. Newly installed Advanced Camera for Surveys uses the natural phenomenon of gravitational lensing to magnify distant galaxies. The arcs center in Abell are light from galaxies behind the cluster being warped by its gravity. Benitez JHU , T. Ford JHU , M. The arcs of light in this detail image are actually from distant galaxies, being magnified and warped by the gravity of Abell , which is in between them and the telescope.

On January 7, , STScI released this Hubble image illustrating the effect of gravity warping space, and thus light, as predicted by Albert Einstein. Though Hubble had previously used the natural phenomena of massive bodies in space magnifying distant objects behind them—known as gravitational lensing—it had never been seen in such dramatic detail. The associated data from the observation provided material for the study of the age of the universe, its early eons, and the elusive nature of dark matter.

This full-sky map of the cosmic microwave background radiation CMB , the oldest light in the universe, is based on data collected over the course of 12 months.

The colors represent slight differences from the average temperature of 2. When seen with our eyes or viewed with telescopes that are designed to see only visible light, the space between distant stars and galaxies looks completely dark.

But in fact, the entire sky is lit with a faint glow of very low-frequency light, a relic of the energy left over from the big bang that formed the universe some This glow, known as the cosmic microwave background radiation CMB , was first detected in Between and , the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite COBE mapped the radiation across the entire sky, revealing slight variations, or anisotropies, which reflect slight differences in temperature from place to place.

The map was updated regularly until , and details of the CMB were further refined with data from the Planck Space Telescope between and In January , a dull star in an obscure constellation suddenly became , times more luminous than our Sun, temporarily making it the brightest star in our Milky Way galaxy.

The mysterious star, called V Monocerotis, has long since faded back to obscurity but Hubble observations of a phenomenon called a "light echo" around the star have uncovered remarkable new features. A Pegasus rocket launched the Galaxy Evolution Explorer GALEX into orbit on a mission to observe galaxies in ultraviolet light across 10 billion years of cosmic history. GALEX mission science goals included mapping the history of galaxy and star formation in the universe, and performing ultraviolet all-sky imaging and ultraviolet wide-area spectroscopic surveys.

The Spitzer Space Telescope seen against the infrared sky. Hurt SSC. All of seven planets could have liquid water. Hurt, T. Pyle IPAC. Lyman Spitzer, settled into an Earth-trailing orbit. The observatory was purposefully designed to have two missions: one cool and one warm. The first used cryogenically cooled instruments to efficiently map large areas of the sky. After it depleted its liquid helium more than five year later, it switched to its second mission.

Spitzer currently uses two IRAC channels to measure the near- to mid-infrared portion of the spectrum to study comets and asteroids in our solar system, planets orbiting other stars, and distant galaxies.

Three of the planets are located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water. The finding set a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field shows an estimated 10, galaxies; in it was the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos, cutting across billions of light-years. The spiral galaxy in the upper right panel is one of the closest in the HUDF, from about 1 billion years ago.

The smallest, reddest galaxies shown in these panels may be among the most distant known. The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just million years old. Spirit captured a picture of its own tracks near Husband Hill on sol A rover captured a close-up of small spherules on the Martian surface with the microscopic imager on its robotic arm.

The area shown is 1. The Mars Rover Spirit was the first to land on the Red Planet on January 3, after a journey of almost seven months, with Opportunity following on January They landed on opposite sides of the planet and began their missions of photography and on-site analysis of Martian rocks and soil. Less than two months after landing, NASA announced that Opportunity had found evidence of past-flowing liquid water.

Beckwith and STScI staff quickly took up Administrator O'Keefe's challenge to develop new methods of extending Hubble's scientific capacity without the servicing mission upgrades. In December , the NRC committee announced its support for reinstating a shuttle servicing mission.

The Pleiades is an open cluster, which contains up to several thousand stars distributed in a region a few light-years across. By measuring slight changes in the apparent positions of three stars within the cluster, when viewed from different sides of Earth's orbit, astronomers using Hubble's Fine Guidance Sensors were able to refine the distance to the Pleiades at about light-years. Gamma-ray bursts are fleeting events, lasting only a few milliseconds to a few minutes, never to appear in the same spot again.

They occur from our vantage point about once a day. Some bursts appear to be from massive star explosions that form black holes. The Helix is a planetary nebula, the glowing gaseous envelope expelled by a dying, sun-like star. The Helix resembles a simple doughnut as seen from Earth. But looks can be deceiving. New evidence suggests that the Helix consists of two gaseous disks nearly perpendicular to each other.

Hubble engineers shut down one of the three operational gyroscopes aboard the observatory to preserve the operating life of the third gyro and extend Hubble's science observations. Two new moons, Nix and Hydra, are roughly 5, times fainter than Pluto and are about two to three times farther from Pluto than its large moon, Charon, discovered in The Crab Nebula is a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. The colors in the image indicate the different elements that were expelled during the explosion.

Blue in the filaments in the outer part of the nebula represents neutral oxygen, green is singly-ionized sulfur, and red indicates doubly-ionized oxygen. This is a composite image of dark matter and normal matter torn apart by a galaxy collision. Visible light of galaxies is shown in orange and white; X-ray light of hot gas is in pink; invisible dark matter is mapped in blue. In this model, the hot gas in red in each cluster is slowed down and distorted during the collision.

The dark matter in blue however, moves ahead because it does not interact with itself or with normal matter except gravitationally. Less than 20 percent of the matter in the universe is normal matter: protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up stars, gas, dust, and other materials. Dark matter does not reflect or emit any type of light and can be detected based only on the gravitational influence it exerts on normal matter and on light.

In , the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, working in collaboration with Hubble and other telescopes, revealed the most direct evidence yet that dark matter does exist. Observations of a galaxy cluster known as the Bullet Cluster showed that there is not enough mass in the normal matter to explain the motions of the galaxies in the cluster.

Without dark matter holding them together, the galaxies and hot gas would have quickly flown apart. In addition, the distribution of mass in the cluster does not coincide with the distribution of normal matter. These observations helped rule out a competing idea that the effects attributed to dark matter could be the result of an incomplete understanding of gravity. Brown California Institute of Technology. The Hubble Space Telescope, which observed the Kuiper Belt object Xena in December , revealed to astronomers that it is approximately 5 percent larger than Pluto.

Hubble observations yielded a diameter of 1, miles with an uncertainty of 60 miles , while it measured Pluto's diameter as 1, miles. Previous ground-based observations suggested that Xena was about 30 percent greater in diameter. Xena is located about 10 billion miles away and amounts to 1. The team, led by Dr. Mike Brown, planned to use Hubble and other telescopes to study additional Kuiper Belt objects that are almost as large as Pluto and Xena.

Finding that the largest known Kuiper Belt object is a virtual twin to Pluto further complicated the debate about whether to categorize the large icy worlds that dwell in the Kuiper Belt as planets.

If Pluto were considered to be the minimum size for a planet, Xena would also fulfill the criterion. This three-dimensional map offers a first look at the web-like large-scale distribution of dark matter, an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe's mass. The dark matter filaments began to form first and provided an underlying scaffolding for the subsequent construction of stars and galaxies from ordinary matter.

This milestone takes astronomers from inference to direct observation of dark matter's influence in the universe. Although astronomers cannot see dark matter, they can infer its existence by mapping the distorted shapes of the background galaxies. Hubble makes the first detection ever of an organic molecule methane in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting another star.

The breakthrough is an important step in eventually identifying signs of life on a planet outside our solar system. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope launches as an international and multi-agency space mission that studies the cosmos in the energy range 10 keV — GeV. Fermi has an imaging gamma-ray telescope vastly more capable than instruments flown previously, as well as a secondary instrument to augment the study of gamma-ray bursts.

Hubble is placed in safe mode: solar panels pointed towards the Sun and turning antennas to allow for communications. The unit that failed is replaced in Servicing Mission 4. Hubble takes the first visible-light snapshot of a planet Fomalhaut b orbiting its parent star. The images show the planet, named Fomalhaut b, as a tiny point source of light orbiting the nearby, bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis.

Hubble travels at a speed of 17, mph and has covered a distance equivalent to a trip to Neptune, the furthermost planet in our solar system. Hubble has peered back into the very distant past, to locations more than Since its mission began in , Hubble has made more than 1.

Hubble's success is in no small part due to its position high above the atmosphere, removing many effects that hamper ground-based observers. In fact, ultraviolet astronomy is all but impossible to complete from the ground due to the presence of gases like ozone that block ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere.

Thanks to this and the lack of the turbulent air currents that make stars look like they are twinkling, Hubble is able to take some of the sharpest and deepest images of our Universe.

When Hubble shows us images in space, the view it gives us is always of how objects looked some time in the past. This is because light takes time to travel the long distances from the objects it came from.

Even with relatively local objects the delay can be impressive, with our nearest neighbouring galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, being viewed as it was almost 2. This means telescopes like Hubble act like time machines, enabling us to study the history of our Universe.

Hubble also provided conclusive evidence for the existence of Supermassive Black Holes in the centres of galaxies by observing the galaxy M Hubble also assisted the production of a 3D-map showing the distribution of dark matter in the Universe. Hubble also photographed a never-before-seen evidence of a collision between two asteroids. The 10,th scientific paper using Hubble data was published.