Hubble telescope -a suggestion with great rewards

“I never felt there was any great risk in starting new ventures. The greater risk was missing an opportunity.â€�      

— Robert N. Noyce

In 1962, the United States National Academy of Sciences recommended building a large space telescope. At that time there were many large telescopes operating in the United States, Hawaii, Chile, the Canary Islands and other places around the world. All were resting on the ground with the air and clouds reducing the quality of the pictures.

Congress voted to fund the space telescope project in 1977, and that started the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope, honoring Edwin Hubble, one of the greatest astronomers ever. NASA was the major organization involved in this project.  

Eight years later, in 1985, the construction was completed and the Hubble Telescope was ready to be launched into space. However, because of the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, the launching was delayed until 1990, when the space shuttle took the telescope up to circle the earth at an altitude of 593 km above the earth’s surface. The scope circles around the earth in 96 to 97 minutes.

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The first pictures taken by the Hubble were poor, not sharp, and distressing to NASA. They discovered a major flaw in the giant mirror. It was too flat on one edge by only 1/50th of the width of a single human hair. What a discomfort!

It took almost three years of study and correction development on the ground, and when that was finished a shuttle flew up to the telescope and the astronauts put in the devices to fix the problem. The first pictures taken after that were sensational, provided new knowledge about outer space, and were a pleasure to view. The Hubble telescope was off to many years of staring into the cosmos and taking pictures that gave information as never before possible. It has provided remarkable new views of the universe, which have revolutionized astronomers’ thinking about many astronomical mysteries.

The observations show clearly that different types of galaxies evolved at different rates. The giant elliptical galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang have changed little. Spiral galaxies like our Milky Way took longer to form and have undergone dramatic changes. Dwarf galaxies appeared quickly and then vanished quickly and mysteriously. Hubble has also uncovered convincing evidence for the existence of super-massive black holes in space. A black hole is an extremely compact and massive object.

Hubble helps astronomers calculate the age of the universe precisely by providing accurate distances to galaxies, which is an important prerequisite for calculating age. Preliminary findings suggested that the universe may be only 9 billion years old. But other researchers using Hubble argue that the age is more like 16 billion years. The figure is still being considered.

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While surveying the Orion nebula, a nearby star-forming region, Hubble returned images of pancake-shaped dust disks surrounding dozens of embryonic stars. These disks may eventually condense to form planetary systems. Their abundance alone suggests that the conditions necessary to form planets are common elsewhere in the universe.

Hubble has uncovered remarkable new details of star birth and has provided positive evidence for the existence of a vast belt of primordial icy debris about our own solar system.  It is a reservoir for comets flying through interplanetary space. Although astronomers using Earth-based telescopes had previously identified some of the largest objects in the belt, Hubble produced evidence for an underlying population of more than 100 million comets there.

Hubble offered a ringside seat to a once-in-a-millennium event when 21 fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with Jupiter.  As each comet fragment crashed into Jupiter, Hubble photographed mushroom-shaped plumes along the limb of Jupiter. Such detailed views were totally unavailable when using any other telescope.

Hubble detected what may be ancient helium gas that produced galaxies in the early universe. It found gas that was much older than most stars. The discovery helped confirm the Big Bang theory’s model. Helium was produced with hydrogen in the first three minutes after the Big Bang. Hubble also found that certain light chemical elements, such as lithium, are present in the exact quantity in space as expected if the Big Bang really happened.

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These are only a few of the hundreds of science findings accomplished by the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA plans to keep Hubble going until 2010. As of now, it has already supplied more than 750,000 pictures. Almost incredible!

In the 1920s and 1930s, Edwin Hubble worked diligently at the Mount Wilson Observatory just north of Los Angeles. At that time no one knew or believed that there were galaxies other than our own Milky Way. The telescopes before Mount Wilson’s saw spots of color, but they were not good enough to see what those spots really were.

He discovered that these spots of color were galaxies, and that they were actively moving  away  from the center of the universe at increasing speeds. Hubble then thought, and concluded, that their motion, when reversed, gave credence to the theory that the universe started as a little dot, which then executed the “Big Bangâ€� some 16 to 18 billion years ago.

Sidney X. Shore is a scientist, inventor and educator who lives in Sharon and holds more than 30 U.S. patents