Hubble Opens Our Eyes
The space telescope brings strange things into view.
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| The Hubble Space Telescope was placed in orbit around Earth by a space-shuttle crew. NASA is designing a new space telescope to give an even better view of the wonders of space. | |
Above the blurring effects of the atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope takes sharp, spectacular pictures. Since 1993, the telescope has sent home thousands of pictures of faraway objects. Here are some of the amazing images captured by Hubble.
Galaxies
Far Away
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is made up of more than 100 billion
stars, including our sun. And the universe is made up of countless
galaxies.
To see the farthest galaxies Hubble could detect, scientists pointed the telescope at a small area of dark sky. With no bright stars to wash out the galaxies’ light, Hubble found a beautiful array of distant galaxies.
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In
the photograph, the bright object that seems to shoot off
rays is a dim star in the Milky Way. The other objects are
galaxies. Some are so far away that their light traveled
more than ten billion years before it reached Hubble.
When
Galaxies Crash
The two galaxies shown below have crashed into
each other. (The left part of the picture shows the whole
galactic wreck, with a green line marking the area that Hubble
focused on.) The stars are spaced so far apart that chances
are no two stars will collide.
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As
the galaxies pass through each other, they are tearing
at each other with their powerful gravitational pulls.
At the same time, clouds of gas and dust—much bigger
than any star—are plowing into one another with
so much force that they are forming new stars. In this
picture, you can see the clusters of hot young stars,
which look blue.
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“Twisters” in
Space
In our own galaxy, a bright star (shown to the right in
red) burns in the heart of a giant cloud of gas and dust
called the Lagoon Nebula. Hubble shows that parts of the cloud are twisted. Each
tornado shape is huge—a beam
of light would take six months to travel the length of any
one “tornado.” Now scientists wonder what movements
of hot and cold gases created these beautiful shapes.
See
images of star beginnings and endings in the Photo
Gallery.
