With the James Webb Telescope launched, the amazing machine has taken center stage in space exploration. However, there is still another observatory that captures impressive images of outer space: the NASA Hubble.
Launched in April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope had some difficulty getting it to work. But after a major repair job, while in orbit, scientists managed to make adjustments and start exploring the cosmos like never before.
More than 30 years have passed and Hubble continues to deliver wonders about the depths of the universe. He doesn’t have the reach of James Webb, working with different tools, but his gaze through the data he captures offers important insights for scientists.
A deep field in “empty” space by Hubble
These types of images help count or at least estimate the number of galaxies in the universe. The capture of Hubble was in 1995 and at that time, only in that table that we share below, about three thousand galaxies were counted.
Yes, what you see in the following image are not stars, they are galaxies that are thousands of light years apart from each other, according to a review MesonStars.
The Hubble Launch
Named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), who demonstrated the expansion of the Universe in 1929, the telescope was launched on the STS-31 mission as part of the inaugural Great Observatories program.
It weighs about 11 tons, is cylindrical in shape, with a length of 13.2 meters and a diameter of 4.2 meters. It cost NASA and ESA about $2.8 billion.
“The capabilities of Hubble”, defines NASA on its website, “They have grown enormously in their more than 30 years of operation. This is because new state-of-the-art scientific instruments have been added to the telescope. over the course of five astronaut service missions.”