Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Hubble turns 32, continues to reveal the wonders of space

Georgina Torbet
By

Tomorrow, Sunday, April 24, marks the 32nd birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope. Since its launch in 1990, the telescope has helped uncover secrets of the universe as well as produced some absolutely stunning images of space.

Hubble’s 32nd Year in Orbit

NASA has released a video about Hubble’s birthday, including an overview of some of the things the telescope has imaged and discovered in the last few months and years. That includes recently measuring the largest comet ever seen and observing the weather on Jupiter and Saturn, including how the storm which makes up Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is getting faster and Saturn’s bands of atmosphere are changing colors. In addition, study of two of Jupiter’s moons — Ganymede and Europa — showed that they have water vapor in their atmospheres.

And that’s just within the solar system. In the Milky Way, Hubble has imaged creepy star CW Leonis, taken an ultraviolet image of planet PDS 70b, and seen an expanding bubble of gas near the heart of our galaxy. Further out into the cosmos, Hubble has spotted a black hole that seems to be helping stars to form instead of destroying them, solved the mystery of a mirrored double galaxy, and detected the farthest star ever seen, whose light had taken nearly 13 billion years to reach us.

Related
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 40. This snapshot reflects a special moment in their lifetimes as they fall together before they merge.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 40. This snapshot reflects a special moment in their lifetimes as they fall together before they merge. NASA, ESA, and STScI

In addition, Hubble scientists shared one more beautiful Hubble image for the telescope’s birthday, showing a group of five galaxies that are unusually packed together. The Hickson Compact Group 40 consists of three spiral galaxies, one elliptical galaxy, and one lenticular galaxy, all of which are so close together they will eventually collide together and merge into one large galaxy.

While other similarly dense galaxy groups have been observed near the centers of huge galaxy clusters, this group is unusual for being located in a relatively empty area of space, leading astronomers to wonder why the group is so squished together. One theory is that large amounts of dark matter are clouded around the galaxies, slowing their movements and holding the group together.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
How to track NASA’s Orion spacecraft on its voyage back to Earth
Orion's first image of Earth.
Watch space station’s new solar array unfurl in space
A new solar array unfurling at the space station in December 2022.
China’s Tiangong space station has a new three-person crew
Illustration of China’s Tiangong space station.
Orion spacecraft reenters moon’s gravity on its way home
A camera mounted on one of Orion’s four solar arrays captured this image of the Moon on flight day 17 of the 25.5-day Artemis I mission from a distance of more than 222,000 miles from Earth. Orion has exited the distant lunar orbit and is heading for a Dec. 11 splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
How to watch SpaceX launch its new Cargo Dragon capsule to ISS
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon cargo capsule lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on the company’s 22nd Commercial Resupply Services mission to the International Space Station.
Orion spacecraft enters distant retrograde orbit around the moon
View of the Moon seen from ESA's European Service Module that is powering NASA's Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back, on flight day nine of the Artemis I mission, on 24 November 2022.
Strangely chonky exoplanet has astronomers puzzled
Artist’s conception of a gas giant exoplanet orbiting around a Sun-like star. The young exoplanet HD 114082 b revolves around its Sun-like star within 110 days at a distance of 0.5 astronomical units.
All the science that’s launching to the space station today
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the company’s Dragon cargo spacecraft atop, is raised to a vertical position at NASA Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on Nov. 21, 2022, in preparation for the 26th commercial resupply services launch to the International Space Station.
Listen to the spooky echoes of a black hole
The black hole in V404 Cygni is actively pulling material away from a companion star — with about half the mass of the Sun — into a disk around the invisible object. A burst of X-rays from the black hole detected in 2015 created the high-energy rings from a phenomenon known as light echoes, where light bounces off of dust clouds in between the system and Earth. In these images, X-rays from Chandra are shown, along with optical data from the Pan-STARRS telescope that depict the stars in the field of view.
Hubble captures a pair of galaxies merging into an unusual ring shape
The galaxy merger Arp-Madore 417-391 steals the spotlight in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Arp-Madore catalog is a collection of particularly peculiar galaxies spread throughout the southern sky, and includes a collection of subtly interacting galaxies as well as more spectacular colliding galaxies. Arp-Madore 417-391, which lies around 670 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus in the southern celestial hemisphere, is one such galactic collision. The two galaxies were distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving their cores nestled side by side.
See a stunning image of the Orion nebula stellar nursery
This infrared image of the Orion Nebula features plenty of dust but no stars. In these infrared wavelengths, it’s possible to see hot spots where new stars are forming, while unseen bright, massive stars have carved out caverns of empty space.
James Webb gets most detailed look yet at an exoplanet’s atmosphere
New observations of WASP-39b with the JWST have provided a clearer picture of the exoplanet, showing the presence of sodium, potassium, water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide in the planet's atmosphere. This artist's illustration also displays newly detected patches of clouds scattered across the planet.
SpaceX Dragon spacecraft delivers new solar arrays and more to ISS
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon cargo craft lifts off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to the International Space Station on Nov. 26, 2022.