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NASA.gov brings you the latest images, videos and news from America's space agency. Get the latest updates on NASA missions, watch NASA TV live, and learn about our quest to reveal the unknown and benefit all humankind.

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Pictures The Hubble Telescope Has Taken.

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Pictures The Hubble Telescope Has Taken.

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Explore a developing gallery of images featuring astronomical observations and informative science content around the Hubble Space Telescope mission.

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The Hubble Space Telescope helps scientists understand how planets and galaxies form.

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Researchers from the UA and across the globe have used Hubble to peer into distant galaxies, and to better understand the history and the future of our expanding universe. Here, we offer information on Hubble, its history, and how UA astronomers have used it to create new astronomical knowledge.

Hubble Space Telescope Facts

Hubble Space Telescope is about the size of a large school bus.

It weighs 24,500 pounds. That's just under two adult male African bush elephants.

Hubble gathers energy from the sun using two 25-foot solar panels. It requires much less power than one might think, averaging 2,100 watts of power usage. A hair dryer requires about 1,800 watts.

Hubble orbits the Earth at a cruising speed of 17,000 miles per hour, and takes 15 minutes to rotate 90 degrees.

Hubble has observed locations more than 13.4 billion light years away, meaning it has seen light that existed in the universe 13.4 billion years ago.

Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 13,000 journal articles, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built.

University of Arizona Discoveries on Hubble

The University of Arizona has contributed to innumerable studies in space sciences, and its researchers have been using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to do so for decades. Each year since 1990, NASA has funded the research efforts of a select group of astronomers through its prestigious Hubble Fellowship. Since then, nearly 20 University of Arizona researchers have been named Hubble fellows. Below are just some of the discoveries that UA astronomers have made using Hubble.

1994: A team of astronomers led by Peter Smith, professor emeritus at the UA, took the world's first images of Saturn's moon, Titan. At the time, scientists suspected that Titan's surface was covered with a global ethane-methane ocean. The images revealed that, in fact, there was at least some solid surface on Titan.

1996: A team that included Erich Karkoschka, UA Lunar and Planetary Lab senior staff scientist, captured images of Uranus's atmosphere, observing clear and hazy layers created by a mixture of gases. Using infrared filters, Hubble captured detailed features of three layers of the planet's atmosphere.

1996: Through research done by then UA senior staff scientist Steve Larson and others, Hubble captured a rare view of Saturn's rings, seen just after the sun had set below the ring plane. This perspective is unusual because the Earth is slightly above Saturn's rings and the Sun is below them, so normally we see the rings fully illuminated by the Sun.

1999: Hubble completed an eight-year effort to measure the expanding universe, co-led by Robert Kennicutt, then UA professor of astronomy. The team found that a galaxy appears to be moving 160 thousand miles per hour faster for every 3.3 light-years away from Earth. The team used the Hubble telescope to observe 18 galaxies out to 65 million light-years.

First view of a dust ring around a star taken by Hubble space telescope for University of Arizona research

1999: The Hubble Space Telescope gave astronomers their first views of a dust ring around a star and a dark gap dividing an immense dust disk around another star. UA astronomer for Steward Observatory Glenn Schneider was on the team that captured these images.

2006: A team led by then UA astronomer Doug Clowe and including Steward Observatory astronomer Dennis Zaritsky found direct proof of dark matter using Hubble Space Telescope.

2007: Hubble took images of asteroids that helped astronomers prepare for a spacecraft visit. The images of Vesta and Ceres showed two of the most massive asteroids in the asteroid belt, a region between Mars and Jupiter and helped astronomers plan for the Dawn spacecraft's tour of these asteroids. UA astronomer Mark Sykes was on the team that captures the images.

2011: UA Lunar and Planetary Lab Professor Adam Showman contributed to Hubble's one millionth scientific observation, an eclipsing extrasolar planet and host star.

Hubble Space Telescope History

The Hubble Space Telescope is named after Edwin P. Hubble, the American astronomer who confirmed that the universe is expanding, which provides the foundation for the Big Bang theory.

In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble used the 100-inch telescope at Mt. Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles-then the largest telescope in the world-to discover that the Andromeda is its own galaxy. It was previously believed that the Andromeda Galaxy, and others like it, were "spiral nebulas" within the Milky Way.

Although the HST is named after Hubble, its history begins with another man: Lyman Spitzer. In 1946, Spitzer was a professor and researcher at Yale University. He wrote a paper titled "Astronomical Advantages of an Extra-Terrestrial Observatory," wherein he argues that a space-based telescope could take clearer photos by evading Earth's atmosphere and could detect electromagnetic frequencies that ground-based telescopes cannot. Decades later, in the 1970s, Spitzer helped lead NASA's lobbying efforts for Hubble.

Don't feel bad for Lyman Spitzer though. He eventually got his name on a telescope. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope launched in 2003.

The HST launched in April 1990 from the space shuttle Discovery, and took its first image of a star cluster 1,300 light years away, NGC 352, a little over a month later. The image is notoriously unremarkable, for a couple of reasons.

The first: Every telescope undergoes a "first light" test. When, for the first time ever, light travels through the telescopes optics and hits its detectors, the telescope has experienced its "first light." First light images tend to be unimpressive, meant not for the public, but simply a test. In the case of the Hubble Space Telescope, the press was invited to watch as Hubble opened its eyes for the first time, and, as the story goes, they weren't impressed. One is said to have asked, "Is that the way it's supposed to look?"

Hubble was a $2.5 billion scientific venture, and its first photo was only 50% sharper than what an already existing ground-based telescope in Chile could take.

Hubble engineers scrambled to improve the image quality, but quickly discovered that Hubble's major defect was in its main mirror.

Three years later, engineers were able to fully correct Hubble's blurry eyesight. The mirror had a spherical aberration caused by a manufacturing error. So in late 1993, NASA mounted a repair mission. A crew of seven astronauts flew to Hubble and spent five days installing two new cameras.

A repair mission of this sort would not be possible on any other space-based telescope. Hubble was the first one that NASA designed to be serviced and repaired in space.

The first new images from Hubble reached Earth that same December. In over 25 years of operation, Hubble has taken some of the world's most stunning images of the vast, incomprehensibly ancient universe.

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Researchers from the UA and across the globe have used Hubble to peer into distant galaxies, and to better understand the history and the future of our expanding universe. Here, we offer information on Hubble, its history, and how UA astronomers have used it to create new astronomical knowledge.

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An Icon in Space

The Hubble Space Telescope has lasted an astounding 20 years, and in that time it has revolutionized our understanding of the universe. Here is a short rundown of Hubble's greatest achievements.

Dark Matter

Dark matter, which is invisible but reveals its existence via gravity, makes up roughly 23 percent of the universe. By analyzing the distortions caused by dark matter's gravity on light from distant galaxies, Hubble helped construct the largest scale 3-D maps scientists have of where dark matter is distributed in the universe. These helped show the clumpiness of dark matter has apparently increased over time, showing it exhibits ordinary gravity, as opposed to something else. Better understanding how dark matter behaves could help scientists figure out what it actually is.

Pluto and its kin

Hubble discovered two new moons of Pluto, dubbed Nix and Hydra, and recently mapped seasonal changes to its surface. Also, by helping to find out the mass of Eris, which is 27 percent more massive than Pluto, the realization that similar bodies might lurk in the Kuiper Belt and beyond helped demote Pluto and similar objects to dwarf planet status. Future observations of such distant bodies could help scientists better understand how the solar system evolved.

Protoplanetary disks

By gazing at star-forming regions such as the Orion Nebula, Hubble was able to show that protoplanetary disks of gas and dust are ubiquitous around many young stars. This reinforces the idea that alien worlds are common in the universe.

Gamma ray bursts

Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe, typically cutting loose more energy in seconds than our sun will release in its entire 10 billion year lifetime. The origin of these bursts was a mystery for decades. Hubble helped discover these bursts typically occur in galaxies that were actively forming stars and were low in metallicity - that is, low in elements heavier than helium. This suggested gamma ray bursts emerged as massive stars collapsed to form black holes - active star-forming galaxies are often rich in massive stars that collapse quickly, and low-metallicity stars are more likely to retain their mass and form black holes.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9

The comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided spectacularly with Jupiter in 1994, an impact Hubble captured in all its startling glory. The giant planet's gravitational pull ripped the comet apart into fragments, resulting in 21 visible impacts. The largest collision created a fireball that rose about 1,800 miles (3,000 km) above the Jovian cloud tops as well as a giant dark spot more than 7,460 miles (12,000 km) across - about the size of the Earth - and was estimated to have exploded with the force of 6,000 gigatons of TNT. Not only did Hubble's observations heighten public interest in the effects of cosmic impacts, they also shed light on Jupiter's atmosphere.

Dark Energy

By determining the rate at which the universe is expanding, Hubble may have helped solve the mystery of how old the universe is, but it unexpectedly turned up an even more profound one - the fact that the rate of the universe's expansion is not slowing down or even constant, but is inexplicably accelerating. The culprit behind this, dubbed dark energy, is now thought to make up 74 percent of the combined mass-energy in the entire universe, and it remains an utter enigma. Solving this mystery could revolutionize physics as we know it.

Black Holes

Hubble discovered that super-massive black holes probably lurk in every galaxy that has a bulge of stars at its center. The very tight link between the size of these central black holes and the size of their galaxies Hubble saw also showed that both evolve in concert, shedding light on how the universe has evolved over time.

Alien Worlds

Most of the more than 400 or so extrasolar planets found so far were actually discovered by telescopes on the ground. Still, Hubble has made some important advances in our research into alien worlds, such as determining the composition of the atmosphere of an exoplanet for the first time and actually imaging the visible light of Fomalhaut b.

The beginning of time...

Before Hubble, it was highly uncertain as to when the universe was born, which could lead to unbearable paradoxes, such as the laughable possibility that stars astronomers detected were older than our universe. By greatly narrowing down the rate at which the universe is expanding, Hubble helped refine estimates of the universe's age down to roughly 13.75 billion years, a result that not only plays a role in modeling how our universe has evolved over time, but also in our understanding other seemingly unrelated cosmic parameters, such as the mass of neutrinos.Stars that are billions of light years away naturally took billions of years to get here, and

Hubble Still Goes On

The most amazing thing about Hubble besides its scientific findings could be how surprisingly long-lived it has proven. Five missions to service it over the years not only provided vital repairs but also upgrades that gave it new capabilities each time, enabling it to keep on coming up with new discoveries and even more breathtaking images. After the last mission to service it in 2009, Hubble could go on working for at least five years.

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Most Amazing Hubble Space Telescope Discoveries

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The Hubble Space Telescope has lasted an astounding 20 years, and in that time it has revolutionized our understanding of the universe. Here is a short rundown of Hubble's greatest achievements. Dark matter, which is invisible but reveals its existence via gravity, makes up roughly 23 percent of the universe.

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In the Beginning
Since the dawn of civilization, man was limited by his vision and imagination about his understanding of the universe. The telescope enhanced his vision and tempered his pride, as observations by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler in the 16th and 17th centuries A.D. rebuffed the millennia-old conceit that the Earth is the center of the universe, spearheading the Scientific Revolution.

By the 18th century, the telescope would become the indispensable instrument for investigations of the cosmos. Bigger and better telescopes were built all over the world. Planets, stars, and nebulae which could not be seen by the naked eye were now being routinely noted and logged. Advances in spectroscopy, photography, and photometry increased telescope versatility, sensitivity, and discovery power.

Enter Edwin Hubble
By the turn of the 20th century, most astronomers believed that the observable universe consisted of one galaxy, our Milky Way Galaxy, an oasis of stars, dust, and gas in the vastness of space. However, in 1924, American astronomer Edwin Hubble used the 100-inch Hooker Telescope (see image below) on Mount Wilson near Los Angeles, California, to observe billions of other galaxies besides our own Milky Way, almost all moving away from each other. This suggested that the universe is expanding, unleashing a Pandora's box of seminal inquiries-such as the Big Bang theory-about the possible beginning and end of the universe-issues which are still being debated to this day.

Image left: American astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1924 - used the 100-inch Hooker Telescope. Image credit: NASA

Astronomers like Edwin Hubble (before and after his time), toiled long, frigid nights inside enormous dome-shaped "observatories" pointing their telescopes skyward, yearning for the best possible snapshot of the heavens. However they faced a major obstacle that stood between them and a clear view of the universe: the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth's atmosphere is a fluid, chaotic soup of gas and dust. It blurs visible light, causing stars to twinkle and making it difficult to see faint stars. It hinders or even totally absorbs other wavelengths of light, making observations of such wavelength ranges as infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays and X-rays difficult or virtually impossible (it is also these properties which protect us from the harmful effect of these rays).

Observatories with the largest of telescopes in various continents have been perched upon mountain tops and away from distracting city lights, from Caucasus Mountains in Europe to the Australian outback, with varying levels of success. Adaptive optics and other image processing techniques have minimized - but not totally eliminated - the effects of the atmosphere.

A Telescope in Space?
In 1923, German scientist Hermann Oberth, one of the three fathers of modern rocketry (Oberth, Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky), published "Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen" ("The Rocket into Planetary Space"), which mentioned how a telescope could be propelled into Earth orbit by a rocket. In 1946, Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer wrote about the scientific benefits of a telescope in space, above Earth's turbulent atmosphere.

Image right: Image of an Optical Telescope assembly drawing. Image credit: NASA

Following the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) successfully launched two Orbital Astronomical Observatories (OAOs) into orbit. They made a number of ultraviolet observations and provided learning experiences for the manufacture and launch of future space observatories.

The LST - Large Space Telescope
Meanwhile, scientific, governmental, and industrial groups planned the next step beyond the OAO program. Spitzer gathered the support of other astronomers for a "large orbital telescope" and addressed the concerns of its critics. In 1969, the National Academy of Sciences gave its approval for the Large Space Telescope (LST) project, and the hearings and feasibility studies continued.

After Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" on the moon in 1969, funding for NASA space programs began to dwindle, putting the LST program in jeopardy. LST planners had to design the telescope under budget constraints. A number of downsizing measures were weighed and considered: decrease the size of the primary mirror, the number of scientific instruments, the diameter of the Systems Support Module and the number of spare parts created and tests performed. In 1974, the LST Science Working Group recommended the space telescope carry a large complement of interchangeable instruments. They would have specifications to resolve at least one-tenth of an arcsecond, and have a wavelength range from ultraviolet through visible to infrared light.

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NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

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In the Beginning Since the dawn of civilization, man was limited by his vision and imagination about his understanding of the universe. The telescope enhanced his vision and tempered his pride, as observations by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler in the 16th and 17th centuries A.D.