Happy Birthday, Hubble!

The Hubble Space Telescope has been expanding our understanding of the Universe for 26 years! To celebrate, the telescope team has released a spectacular image of the Bubble Nebula. 

Click on image to enlarge.

This beautiful bubble is being created by a super-hot, massive star. The young star is still within the large cloud of gas and dust that it formed in. Its stellar wind is pushing this gas and dust outward, carving out a large cavity within the nebula, creating the bubble-like appearance. The radiation from this star heats up the denser regions of the bubble, causing them to glow.

The Bubble Nebula is contained within an enormous cloud of gas and dust. Image Credit

Image Credit

The bubble is 7 light years across, and being pushed outward at 62,000 miles per hour. Whoa!

The Hubble Space Telescope took a picture of this region many years ago, but this new release is much improved. 

A beautiful partial image of the Bubble Nebula from 2000. Image Credit

Watch a lovely zoom in on the image to get a sense of where it is in space - near the Cassiopeia constellation in our sky. 

The Hubble Space Telescope is an incredible scientific instrument. Not only is it a valuable tool for astronomers who use it to peer into the cosmos, but it is a tremendously successful public outreach effort as well. Because Hubble takes images in visible light - the light our eyes can see - the images released from the telescope capture the imagination of the public. Hubble images are beautiful, inspiring, and often easier to understand than images in other light wavelengths. With most people I encounter at the planetarium, the only space telescope they know of is the Hubble, a testament to its success, and sadly to the less successful outreach efforts of many other incredible instruments such as the Spitzer Space Telescope or the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. 

The Hubble Space Telescope has been incredibly successful. Over 10,000 scientific papers have been published using Hubble data.

One of the most important images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is the Hubble Deep Field. Astronomers pointed the telescope into a seemingly empty part of space for 10 days. They wanted to see what they would find with an incredibly long exposure, in visible and near-infrared light.

That "empty" space was full of galaxies. 

Every dot is a galaxy, containing billions of stars like our Sun. Image Credit

In this tiny field of view - about the width of a dime 75 feet away - there are 1,500 galaxies. This is probably the typical distribution of galaxies in the Universe, since the galaxy distribution appears to be even in all directions. Each of those galaxies contains hundreds of billions of stars. It is likely that many of those stars have planets in orbit. Imagine all the worlds, all the potential, that is out in space.  

Recently, Hubble released a new photo, an Ultra Deep Field. This was taken in near infrared, visible, and near ultra-violet light.

So many galaxies, so many worlds out there. Image Credit

10,000 galaxies are included in this image, which was created with many exposures over 841 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Happy Birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope, and a tremendous thank you to all the engineers, scientists, astronauts, and people all over the world who have kept this fantastic spacecraft working for 26 years. 

You can learn more about space telescopes and what's happening in the night sky at the Dome Planetarium at the Peoria Riverfront Museum. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for daily updates!   

To learn more about Edwin Hubble, the astronomer for which the space telescope is named, plus a lot of 20s fun, join us for this special event Friday!