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the Hubble Telescope Launch Anniversary
“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.”
~ Edwin Hubble (1889–1953)
Fortunately for astronomers and sky-watchers alike, there’s no reason not to kilt up properly for a night under the stars—there are plenty of tartans that take their inspiration from the galaxy itself.
In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the “spiral nebulae” seen through telescopes were not small objects within our own galaxy, but entirely separate galaxies far beyond the Milky Way, dramatically expanding the known scale of the universe. He also showed that these galaxies are moving away from us, and that their speed increases with distance—a relationship now known as the Hubble–Lemaître Law, providing the first clear evidence that the universe is expanding.
The Hubble Space Telescope, named in his honor, was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery and placed into orbit about 340 miles above Earth, offering an unusually clear view into the depths of space. From that vantage point, it has produced some of the most detailed and striking images of the cosmos, steadily refining our understanding of how the universe is structured and how it evolves.
Among its many observations is the long-term approach of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy—an eventual merger that is already underway in slow motion. In studying Andromeda, Hubble revealed an interesting detail: although the two galaxies are broadly similar in age, the stars in Andromeda’s outer halo are noticeably younger than those surrounding our own. The likely explanation is a more turbulent past, with Andromeda having absorbed a number of smaller galaxies over time.
Through Hubble’s lens, the universe presents itself not as something static, but as an active, shifting system shaped by collisions, accretions, and gradual change. This tartan draws directly from those luminous, layered galactic images first captured by Hubble and the observatories that followed. 🖤 💜 🤍 💗 ❤️ 🔭✨ 🌌
The Hubble Space telescope (HST), responsible for some of our most dazzling pictures of the universe yet available to our generation, was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, and was deployed into Earth's orbit a day later.
Named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, it is one of NASA's Great Observatories, along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Hubble is the only telescope designed to be serviced in space by astronauts for maintenance and equipment upgrades.
Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few hundred million stars to giants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass. Galaxies are categorized according to their visual visual morphology as elliptical spiral, or irregular. Many galaxies are thought to have supermassive black holes at their centers. The Milky Way's central black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, has a mass four million times greater than the Sun!
Hubble has helped resolve some long-standing problems in astronomy, while also raising new questions.
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Better measurements of distance to the Cepheid variable stars allowed refinement of the Hubble constant, the measure of the rate at which the universe is expanding, which is also related to its age. The estimated age of the universe is now about 13.7 billion years (prior to the Hubble Telescope, scientists predicted an age ranging from 10 to 20 billion years).
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Astronomers from the High-z Supernova Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project used ground-based telescopes and HST to observe distant supernovae and uncovered evidence that, far from decelerating under the influence of gravity, the expansion of the universe may in fact be accelerating! The cause of this acceleration remains poorly understood; the most common cause attributed is dark energy.
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The high-resolution spectra and images provided by the HST have been especially well-suited to establishing the prevalence of black holes in the nuclei of nearby galaxies. While it had been hypothesized in the early 1960s that black holes would be found at the centers of some galaxies, and astronomers in the 1980s identified a number of good black hole candidates, and work conducted with Hubble shows that black holes are probably common to the centers of all galaxies.
This tartan, designed by Carol A.L. Martin, was inspired by the galactic images seen through the Hubble telescope and its followers.
To learn more about the Hubble Telescope, click the galaxy!