To Infinity And Beyond!

One of NASA’s four Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope captures high-resolution images of the universe. Its 1990 low-orbit launch has brought invaluable discoveries, including recent information about the universe’s continual expansion.

Because of technical issues in its early development, public interest evaded the Hubble until it began capturing its notoriously wondrous images in the early 21st century. Among its most famous images are Pillars of Creation (1995) and Mystic Mountain (2010)—despite their titles and appearances, neither photograph shows solid objects. Pillars of Creation shows interstellar gas and dust 6,000 to 10,000 light years away from Earth that simultaneously creates new stars and becomes eroded by light from existing stars. Mystic Mountain is a region 7,000 light years away where newborn stars fire gas off of “Herbig-Haro” objects (“turbulent-looking patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars”), an interaction that creates the hazy, immaterial, mountain-like forms we see in the photograph.

The Hubble Space Telescope is nearing the end of its life, with a cutoff year set at 2021. A successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is set to launch the same year.