The Hubble telescope is among the most well-known telescopes in operation. It has been photographing celestial objects for nearly 20 years, taking dramatic images that have shaped our understanding of space. The following are the top 10 discoveries made through analysis of Hubble telescope pictures.
1) A dramatic picture of the Bullet Cluster, along with images from two other telescopes, was called direct proof of the existence of dark matter. The images show two large galaxies colliding.
2) After the discovery of dark matter, the Hubble telescope was used extensively to investigate other properties of the universe as a whole. Soon images from the telescope were used to support the theory that the universe as a whole is expanding.
3) 2002 images of white dwarfs gave scientists their best estimate to date of the age of the universe. The intensity of the light from the stars gives direct information about their age, which was concluded to be about 12-13 billion years old. This evidence, when combined with other evidence, led to the guess that the universe is almost 14 billion years old.
4) Over two decades ago, supernovas were spotted with a ring of lights known as “cosmic pearls”. While noticed long ago, the Hubble telescope is the only instrument with enough resolution to see each bead of light clearly. The rings were concluded to be dust and debris shed by the supernova before it died.
5) The Hubble telescope received a great deal of publicity in 1994, when the world was able to see P/Shoemaker-Levy 9, a massive comet, crash into Jupiter. The comet had split into 20 pieces before making collision.
6) The Hubble telescope was the first to locate and photograph extra-solar planets, or planets beyond our own solar system. A whole new class of planets was soon developed, which rotate around their sun in under a day, and over a dozen Jupiter size planets were spotted.
7) A picture from 2005 showed three previously unknown satellites of Pluto, the former 9th planet of our solar system. This brought the total number of “moons” to three.
8) Images throughout the Hubble telescopes time in orbit show that black holes are relatively ubiquitous in our universe. Many black holes were located and photographed.
9) Recent images show that Eris, a neighbor of Pluto, is in fact larger than Pluto. This reignited the controversy over what constitutes a planet, eventually ending in Pluto’s loss of planet status.
10) Photographs of quasars gave insight into their origins. Soon scientists had concluded that quasars were in fact formed by bursts of radiation from black holes in our universe.
