the hubble bubble.

The NASA Hubble Space Telescope is a large, space-based observatory, which has revolutionized astronomy since its launch in April 1990. More than thirty years later, the data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope is still considered highly significant in understanding how the universe works.

Until today, the Hubble Space Telescope remains in operation, capturing high resolution images of space and the cosmos.

It has led to many major breakthroughs, including but not limited to: helping estimate the age and size of the universe, playing a key role in discovering dark energy, detecting black holes, and understanding how planets and galaxies form (Dunbar, 2015).

The telescope was named after American astronomer, Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), who made revolutionary discoveries of the nature of the universe and the entire cosmos.

What did Edwin Hubble do?

Working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, Hubble discovered between 1922 and 1923 that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas were actually faraway galaxies flying away from the Milky Way, bobbing in the outward current of expanding space (Sokol, 2017). The speed of that flow came to be called the Hubble constant. At the time, Hubble was using the Hooker telescope, a 100-inch telescope that was then the world’s most powerful telescope (Bahcall, 2015).

Hubble’s work on galaxies and Hubble's Law led him to the realization that the universe is continuously expanding. Hubble's findings was revolutionary, overturning great scientists like Einstein who thought the universe was static!

Edwin Hubble poses inside the 200-inch Palomar telescope a few years before his death in 1953.

Here are the top 3 Hubble facts presented by the Royal Museums Greenwich (n.d.):

Developed as a partnership between the United States space program and the European Space Agency, Hubble orbits 340 miles above Earth’s surface and travels at a speed of 17,500 mph.

Hubble has peered back into the very distant past, to locations more than 13.4 billion light years from Earth.

The Hubble Deep Fields are considered one of the telescope's greatest contributions to the scientific world because they provide comprehensive snapshots of the cosmos across time and space, helping our fundamental understanding on the age and size of the universe (HubbleSite, 2019). The Deep Fields looks from the present time back to the universe’s early days, revealing a wide range of galaxies of various sizes, shapes, and color.

The first Hubble Deep Field, named the Hubble Deep Field North (HDF-N), was taken in over 10 consecutive days during Christmas 1995, after a team of astronauts were sent on a servicing mission in 1993 to repair a faulty mirror in the telescope.

The original Hubble Deep Field, imaged in 1995 by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2.

It reveals some of the first galaxies to emerge from the "dark ages", the time shortly after the Big Bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dim universe (ESA Hubble, n.d.).

The most recent addition to the Hubble Deep Fields is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), captured in 2003. This shows the farthest galaxies ever seen, allowing astronomers to look even further back in the time of the cosmos.

This is an excerpt from ViewSpace (n.d.):

In 2008, Hubble took a picture of the exoplanet Fomalhaut b, the first visual image of an exoplanet. This world orbits the bright star Fomalhaut in the southern constellation, Piscis Austrinus.

However, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show that Fomalhaut B suddenly disappeared!

So what exactly happened? How is this possible?

According to Anderson (2020), instead of a huge planet, the object photographed and labeled Fomalhaut b, subsequently named Dagon, was actually an expanding cloud of dust.

Reference List in APA 7th Edition. Click 'keep reading' to view full list.

This concept drawing from 1980 shows the original design features of Hubble and its Support Systems Module, which includes the communication equipment, pointing and control systems, and computer (Hille, 2018).