How old is hubble

Hubble has been used in practically every kind of astronomy investigation: studying planets and moons in our own solar system; peering at distant stars, galaxies, supernovas, nebulas, and other astrophysical phenomena; studying the origins and expansion of the universe. Its work in exoplanet science in the last decade has been especially surprising, considering that when the telescope was launched in , we were still five years away from detecting the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star.

This is also critical when we need eyes to study poorly understood phenomena. Take the detection of gravitational waves produced by the collision of two neutron stars.

Four major scientific instruments are currently active onboard Hubble, so even if one or two things stop working, there is still a ton of major science the rest of the observatory can do. That being said, there are no plans for a new service mission. Brown says other nations have nascent plans to put other missions in orbit that could take up the visible and UV investigations currently run by Hubble. China is looking to launch a space telescope called Xuntian in , and state media says it will observe an area of space times larger than Hubble can.

The new age-dating observations were done by Richer and colleagues by using Hubble to go hunting for elusive ancient stars hidden inside a globular star cluster located 5, light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.

The results are to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Conceptually, the new age-dating observation is as elegantly simple as estimating how long ago a campfire was burning by measuring the temperature of the smoldering coals. For Hubble, the "coals" are white dwarf stars, the burned out remnants of the earliest stars that formed in our galaxy. Hot, dense spheres of carbon "ash" left behind by the long-dead star's nuclear furnace, white dwarfs cool down at a predictable rate - the older the dwarf, the cooler it is, making it a perfect "clock" that has been ticking for almost as long as the universe has existed.

This approach has been recognized as more reliable than age-dating the oldest stars still burning by nuclear fusion, which relies on complex models and calculations about how a star burns its nuclear fuel and ages.

White dwarfs are easier to age-date because they are simply cooling, but the trick has always been finding the dimmest and hence longest-running "clocks. As white dwarfs cool they grow fainter, and this required that Hubble take many snapshots of the ancient globular star cluster M4. The observations amounted to nearly eight days of exposure time over a day period.

This allowed for even fainter dwarfs to become visible, until at last the coolest - and oldest - dwarfs were seen. These stars are so feeble at 30th magnitude - which is considerably fainter than originally anticipated for any Hubble telescope imaging with the original cameras , they are less than one-billionth the apparent brightness of the faintest stars that can be seen by the naked eye.

Globular clusters are the first pioneer settlers of the Milky Way. Tickets 0. Payload Blog. Published on April 24, It launched on April 24, and was deployed one day later, April That is why Hubble is in orbit beyond our atmosphere-- to get a clearer picture than what Earth telescopes can capture. Hubble detects visible, near-infrared and ultraviolet light. Hubble has to be very accurate. That equates to about the width of a human hair seen from 1 mile away!

Hubble in Earth orbit after deployment. It takes approximately 95 minutes to complete one trip around Earth. Hubble has orbited Earth over , times in its 30 years of operation. The sun powers Hubble through solar cells on each winged array.

There have been five missions to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope after its launch. Its supposed "successor" - the James Webb Space Telescope JWST - is due for launch next year, but the presence in orbit of this more modern observatory will in truth merely just extend capability; it won't make Hubble redundant.

That's because the new facility has been designed to see the cosmos at longer wavelengths of light than Hubble. The duo will be complementary and will on occasion actually pursue targets together to get a fuller perspective.

This is an exciting prospect for astronomers everywhere - but especially for those in Europe where Hubble has been such a rewarding endeavour, says Esa project scientist Dr Antonella Nota. And it is a peer-reviewed process so we never needed to put a finger on the scales.

European astronomers are creative; they're smart; they're doing leading-edge science," she told BBC News. It's a bit of a cliche, but Hubble has truly been a "discovery machine". Before the telescope launched in , astronomers didn't know whether the Universe was 10 billion years old or 20 billion years old. Hubble's survey of pulsating stars narrowed the uncertainty, and we now know the age extremely well, at The observatory played a central role in revealing the accelerating expansion of the cosmos - a Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough - and it provided the definitive evidence for the existence of super-massive black holes at the centre of galaxies.

It's amazing to think that when Hubble launched, scientists had yet to detect the first exoplanet, the name given to a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun.