The Hubble Telescope: Photographing Worlds Beyond

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered what else could be out there? It seems dark, cold, and vast, full of potential. If you have, you’re not alone. For centuries, scientists have gazed upwards and wondered too.

Enter the telescope. A telescope is an instrument that allows the viewer to see faraway objects in space, like stars and planets. Telescopes have been used as far back as the 1600s to explore the great beyond. The first telescopes used lenses, curved clear pieces of glass, to focus the light from stars into an image your eyes can see. Just as a pair of eyeglasses makes things clearer and helps people see further away, a telescope does that on a much larger scale with a much larger lens. Nowadays, most telescopes are built with curved mirrors. Mirrors are much lighter than lenses and easier to make. A mirror in a telescope will catch even the dimmest light coming from a faraway star or planet and concentrate it into an image we can see.

But down here on Earth, we can only see so far, even with our telescopes. There are many natural and man-made elements that interfere with seeing into space, like rain clouds, lights, and the Earth’s atmosphere. Some scientists will go to the top of mountains where these earthly features aren’t as present. If only we could get high enough above all this interference…perhaps we could see further.

In the 1920s, scientists began to discuss the possibility of launching a telescope into space. After decades of research, fixing problems, and getting enough money, on April 24, 1990, the Hubble Telescope was put on a rocket and launched into space! Once the rocket got far enough away from Earth, it released the Hubble Telescope and it began to orbit the Earth. To orbit means to circle around an object, like how the Moon orbits the Earth. This was a great achievement for astronomy.

Every day since its launch, the Hubble Telescope has observed our universe as it orbits our planet. Scientists around the world can use the Hubble Telescope to take photographs. More than one million photographs taken by the Hubble have unlocked many secrets of the universe.

What are these secrets they are finding? One photograph from 1995 showed a part of the sky that looks empty to our eyes, but actually contained more than 3,000 galaxies! A galaxy is a massive collection of gas, dust, billions of stars, and all their planets, all held together with gravity. Gravity is what pulls you down to Earth. Without gravity, we’d all be flying around into space. So exactly how big are these galaxies? According to NASA, the galaxy Earth is in, the Milky Way, is 621,371,192,237,333,890 miles across, so…BIG.

Galaxies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Our Milky Way is shaped like a massive flat spiral. Just imagine how it would look if somebody spilled milk in the sky—that's how it got its name. Our Solar System exists in the Milky Way galaxy, and the Sun is one of its many bright stars. Although the Sun feels huge to humans, it's actually one of the smaller stars in our galaxy.

In one of the most iconic pictures captured, called the "Pillars of Creation," we see colorful gaseous blobs from which new stars are being born, something we’d never be able to see with just our naked eye. Thanks to the creation and advancement of telescopes, we can capture such wonders on film to study, share, and admire. With so many new advances in technology, who knows what we’ll discover in the years to come?