The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 18 years ago and to celebrate, NASA has put up a photo gallery of merging galaxies, galaxies as in love with each other as NASA is with the Hubble. Aww.
The Hubble telescope recently captured an image of a double Einstein Ring.
An Einstein Ring happens when two galaxies are perfectly aligned. The closer galaxy acts as a lens, magnifying and distorting the view of a more distant galaxy. But today astronomers announced that they've discovered a double Einstein Ring: three galaxies are perfectly aligned, creating a double ring around the lensing galaxy.
On an upcoming servicing mission scheduled for August 2008, NASA plans to upgrade the Hubble telescope to be 90 times as powerful as it currently is. 90 times!
Two powerful new instruments will be installed on the mission. The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) will allow Hubble to see fainter and more distant galaxies than anything it has seen before, shedding light on the early universe. This could allow Hubble to see galaxies so far away that we see them as they were just 400 million years after the big bang.
Using adaptive optics, which corrects for atmospheric distortion, some astronomers have modified a ground telescope to yield sharper images than the Hubble.
Hubble's optics provide greater detail over a wider angle, while the Lucky camera as used at Palomar gives ultra-high resolution only for a tiny slice of the sky at one time.
Top 100 photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, a singularly talented photographer.
Woo, NASA finally decides to fix the Hubble, repairs that will keep it working until at least 2013. "Scientists expect an upgraded Hubble to continue to make groundbreaking discoveries."
