Hubble Space Telescope Turns 25

Since launching on April 24, 1990, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has sent back more than 1 million observations leading to scientific revelations about the Universe. Orbiting 550 km above the Earth, Hubble has also produced stunning images from galaxies billions of miles away as well as from right here in the Solar System. The small telescope—just 4.2 meters wide and 14.3 meters long—was not supposed to last more than a decade, but 25 years later it is still going strong. Here is a small sample of what Hubble has produced in a quarter century of service. Credit: NASA

Twenty years ago, Hubble took one of its most famous images, known as the “Pillars of Creation.” The photo shows columns of gas lit by a cluster of young stars in the Eagle Nebula some 6,500 light years away. For astronomers, it was the visual evidence of the effect of nearby stars on gas in places where smaller stars are created. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI and J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University)

In 2014, Hubble returned for another image of the pillars, enabling scientists to see a jet-like feature ejected from a newly forming star. NASA believes that our Sun may have formed in a similar cluster of stars. “What that means is when you look at the environment of the Eagle Nebula or other star-forming regions, you’re looking at exactly the kind of nascent environment that our Sun formed in,” says Paul Scowen of Arizona State University. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team

At the center of this image is a dying star that once contained five times the mass of the Sun. The glow spreading out like the wings of a butterfly is a stream of ultraviolet radiation. The object is called a planetary nebula because it appears round when seen through a small telescope. The surface of the star is estimated at 400,000F—one of the hottest in the Milky Way galaxy, where it is located. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Hubble photographed this spiral galaxy from its edge, 28 million light years from Earth. Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team

This is a composite image showing dark matter, galaxies and hot gas in the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520, which is 2.4 billion light years away. The image of the galaxies was taken with Hubble and the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. Starlight from galaxies is colored orange. Hot gas, evidence that a collision took place, is shown in green. And the blue areas indicate the location of mass in the cluster—comprised mostly of dark matter—where few galaxies are found, according to NASA. Credit: NASA, ESA, CFHT, CXO, M.J. Lee (University of California, Davis) and A. Mahdavi (San Francisco State University)

Hubble charts the change of seasons during Saturn’s 29-year trip around the Sun. It is fall in Saturn’s northern hemisphere in the lower left image. Winter is shown in the uppermost image. Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team

This image of Jupiter shows a rare alignment of three of Jupiter’s largest moons—Io, Ganymede and Callisto. The alignment is shown by the three black circles in the shadows of the three moons. Ganymede (left), Io (center) and Callisto (right). Only Io, the white spot, and Ganymede, the blue one, are visible in the image, however. Callisto is out of the frame to the right. Credit: NASA, ESA and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)