Hubble Space Telescope

The NASA Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space on October 2, 2009, from the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida (US) to study the cosmos more closely. The telescope has made many discoveries over the past decade and it continues to make new discoveries that are being used by scientists as they further develop their techniques and instruments. The telescope's primary goal is to investigate the nature of matter at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, called extrema. This means that the conditions can be found where no life exists. The name “Hubble” comes from the Greek word for “High Frontier” (Hubble). The Hubble imaging system consists of three identical large mirror less tessellating cameras that provide an unprecedented combination of resolution and sensitivity to image the entire sky. These telescopes have been placed directly behind one another and capture images from different angles around the planet. The telescopes together form two identical structures which allow for a total field of view of 1.2 million square degrees and allow NASA to create its highest-resolution science data ever sent into space. Hubble’s Advanced Technology Development Program (HADP) is led by Goddard Space Flight Center under Associate Administrator for Science and Technology, James Kessler. HADP involves teaming private industry with federal agencies to produce technologies that will help America achieve its ambitious goals in deep science, including research into cutting-edge technologies like superfast radio frequency astronomy (SARA) and gravitational wave detection. NASA and other government agencies fund some of these efforts, known as the Cooperative Agreement, which provides resources for NASA to conduct long-duration exploration on behalf of the agency while maintaining access to commercial technology when available. In addition to building up NASA’s capabilities, the agreement makes sure that NASA does not lose out on collaborating with smaller, less expensive, or innovative companies for mission development or for exploring new areas of science. The NASA/HST Public Relations Office frequently conducts press briefings via live audio webcast, delivering important information about the observatory including details of how and why Hubble may be visited. Hubble is also working with the European Southern Observatory, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and others to build the first all-sky telescope array to use the same radio frequency spectrum and have a similar design to those used by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This will allow Hubble to use this new radio frequency to extend its reach across the southern hemisphere and eventually provide additional coverage of other large parts of the galaxy’s sky. Hubble has already discovered the very first type of dark matter and has begun studying galaxies in detail. In the future, it expects to see the first galaxies formed by collisions very soon after the Big Bang, a crucial time for understanding galaxies and our universe as a whole. Hubble observations and recent results have revealed that there are a few galaxies undergoing rapid growth. One example is what’s dubbed M82–Elliptical–Ma, or EM-Ma for short. When a star forms near the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1052, it pulls gas and dust into a ring-shaped region. As this material falls back toward the central galaxy at high speed through the ring, it glides onto nearby galactic nuclei such as M82. However, the spiral galaxy disturbs the ring and prevents any further movement of the stars into it. When we observe these galaxies, we find that there are fewer bright star clusters or globular clusters, which suggests that either M82 or M62 might be responsible for hindering star formation. We will continue to explore these questions in greater detail using both spectroscopic and observational tools. At higher redshirts the structure of the galaxy changes rapidly. For example, as we move down from a red shift around z=0.3 to z=0.6, the galaxy quickly deforms into a compact disc-like shape. When we look at the core of a typical cluster of blue galaxies, the clusters usually sit close to each other and are roughly spherical. However, when we observe these clusters at red shifts around z=0.7, it appears to look flattened into a round halo shape. The next generation of ground-based telescopes, such as Vera C. Rubin Observatory and Atacama Large Millimeter/sub millimeter Array (ALMA), will continue to explore Hubble’s vast image of the Universe. While currently, the best way to look at the Universe in terms of distance is through the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, this is only sensitive to a limited range of redshifts. When looking at distant stars, the radio waves of the distant past can reveal to us the properties of the gas and dust in what’s known as cold hydrogen, a form of hydrogen never seen before on Earth. For instance: if we know how much hydrogen was present during the early stages of the Solar System, we can learn about how and when various elements got together in our star or galaxy formation or pre-solar system. There are even more ways than one, but none of them can tell us anything about when the Sun was going to become a star!One of the biggest discoveries about the Universe to date could be the discovery of quasars. Although astronomers cannot see quasars directly with traditional telescopes, it is possible to detect their shadows by using powerful radio antennas located at the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) on Chinese soil, which has been operating since 1997. When observing the area surrounding FAST, researchers have been able to spot quasars that, like Earth, emit light in a specific wavelength of radio waves; however, scientists cannot precisely pinpoint what kind and how much they are emitting at any specific wavelength. Quasars are so bright that they have a completely different brightness to normal radio sources for a given epoch.For instance, if you wanted to detect a particular object at redshifts z=0.01, you would need to measure the position and velocity of every single quasar on earth. If the objects were moving away from us at speeds of over 100,000 km/s, then the distance of each quasar would need to be measured along, creating a huge error in measurements.However, through the powerful radio astronomy equipment that has been put in place, a group of researchers led by Zhou Yu of the Beijing Institute of Radio Astronomy (BINA) of China has successfully traced the source of this radio emission coming from 13 redshifts around 0.01. In order to find out what kind of source, they used to observe the Milky Way galaxy for 15 hours, which allowed astronomers to trace exactly where each quasar was coming from. They then observed galaxies at the edge of the disk of M31, just 200 km away from M22, for a period of two months.It turns out these quasars were originating mainly from dwarf galaxies, but we aren’t exactly certain of that yet, but the team believes this could possibly mean that something unexpected else was happening at the time. But no matter what it is, we will surely be able to get deeper studies of a particular source of radio emissions in the future.We are now starting to unravel the mystery of what happens inside the heart of the Milky Way. Some of the most exciting discoveries that we can make are in the search for evidence of dark matter. In the upcoming years, an increasingly large number of people will visit deep space; a journey that could possibly expose us to new kinds of aliens, a possibility that nobody even knew existed.Even after observing all the galaxies that exist in the night sky, we can not really tell which ones belong to a particular class of objects (galaxies, quasars, etc.) or which ones are free from human influence. The majority of our knowledge comes from studying galaxies that are within 30 million of us (the Big Dipper in the northern sky and the Andromeda nebula in the southern sky). There are still other galaxies out there, for instance, the Milky Way and Andromeda, but they are extremely far away from us, and we cannot even remotely see their light.Some of these galaxies that don’t have many star's power are still worth studying because they are too rare. One example is Sagittarius B, which is located about 50 million light-years (about 4 billion miles) from us, so it is extremely difficult to observe. It has been discovered through stellar evolution, which works slowly to change the color of galaxies through time. Since Sagittarius B belongs to the Sagittarius constellation we call Scorpius, it is not the brightest source of light. To see what it looks like in full darkness, an international collaborative team of 20 researchers led by Paul Schmitt of KTH Royal Institute of Technology and colleagues searched the sky for a few days to finally locate its proper location. This was only possible because the galaxy had the right spectral line profile. This discovery can be useful in reconstructing how the Milky Way changed over its history, but it also sheds more light on how old the galaxy is, and what kind of forces must have kept the Milky Way healthy for its longevity.