Who is the hubble telescope named for

These were some of the first galaxies ever created and were forming new stars at rates that were more than a thousand times the rate at which most galaxies form stars in the current universe.

Although astronomers have studied star formation for decades, many questions remain. Part of the problem is that most stars are formed in clouds of molecules and dust. The dust absorbs the ultraviolet and most of the optical light emitted by forming stars, making it difficult for Hubble's ultraviolet and optical instruments to study the process. The longer, or redder, the wavelength of the light, the less is absorbed. That is why sunsets, where the light must pass through long lengths of dusty air, appear red.

The near infrared, however, has an even easier time passing through dust than the red optical light. NICMOS can look into star formation regions with the superior image quality of Hubble to determine the details of where the star formation occurs.

A good example is the iconic Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula, also known as the pillars of creation. The optical image shows majestic pillars which appear to show star formation over a large volume of space. Stars are only being formed at the tip of the pillars. The optical pillars are just empty dust reflecting the light of a group of nearby stars.

Based on the data from NICMOS, scientists learned that fully formed galaxies existed in the universe much earlier than expected. The NICMOS images also confirmed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down as previously thought.

The NHDF infrared images were followed by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field images in , which further showed the power of near infrared imaging of distant young galaxies. On Hubble, a near infrared imager was added to the third version of the Wide Field camera which was installed in May of This camera used an improved version of the NICMOS detector arrays that had more sensitivity and a wider field of view.

These programs were all spawned by the near infrared observations by HST. Hubble Space Telescope image of Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. Photograph of Mars by the Hubble Telescope. Unique Space-inspired gifts Explore space from the comfort of home.

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The ideal telescope of choice for beginner to intermediate astronomers who are looking to expand their skygazing experiences Visit Us. Search Want to search our collection? Hubble uncovered thousands of galaxies in this teensy patch of sky, helping us refine the number of galaxies thought to exist in the universe. In astronomy, the farther away things are, the older they are because light from faraway places takes a very long time to travel to Earth.

That means this Hubble Deep Field is not only a snapshot of space: It also contains the history of our universe. Galaxies in this image appear to us as they were billions of years ago. Hubble has seen light dating to about million years after the Big Bang, which took about The Unexplainable newsletter guides you through the most fascinating, unanswered questions in science — and the mind-bending ways scientists are trying to answer them. Sign up today. Beyond that are barriers through which even the Webb cannot see.

There is some background radiation from the Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background, a faint glow that shines to us from before the dark ages. But for the most part, the dark ages is a blank spot in our timeline of the universe. Casey and other astronomers hope the Webb will help them understand the end of the dark ages and figure out what caused this fog to lift. Scientists suspect the starlight from the earliest galaxies did it. Light comes in a lot of different varieties.

The human eye can see only a narrow band known as visible light, but the universe contains lots and lots of light outside this range, including the higher-frequency, higher-energy forms: ultraviolet, gamma rays. The Hubble Space Telescope collects visible light, ultraviolet, and a little bit of infrared.

Infrared light is often very old light, due to a phenomenon call redshifting. When a light source is moving away from a viewer, it gets stretched out, morphing into a longer and longer wavelength, growing redder.

The opposite is true as well: As a light source grows closer, the wavelengths shorten, growing bluer. Because space is constantly expanding, the farthest things away from us in the universe are moving away from us. The light from that star may start off in the visible spectrum, but it gets stretched on its journey to us.

It grows redder and redder. Eventually, these very distant, old galaxies grow so red that they drop into the infrared spectrum. Webb can see this ancient light that has become invisible to the human eye. Hubble then went one step further. By the end of that decade he had discovered enough galaxies to compare to each other. He created a system for classifying galaxies into ellipticals, spirals and barred spirals — a system called the Hubble tuning fork diagram, used today in an evolved form.

But the most astonishing discovery Hubble made resulted from his study of the spectra of 46 galaxies, and in particular of the Doppler velocities of those galaxies relative to our own Milky Way galaxy. What Hubble found was that the farther apart galaxies are from each other, the faster they move away from each other.

Based on this observation, Hubble concluded that the universe expands uniformly. Hubble and his colleague at Mt. Wilson, Milton Humason who started as a mule driver during the construction of the observatory, then janitor, then night assistant , estimated the expansion rate of the universe to be kilometers per second per megaparsec. A megaparsec, or a million parsecs, is a distance equal to about 3.