Sweet sixteen

On April 24, 1990, astronomy took a great leap forward with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA, the telescope was named for Edwin Hubble, a pioneering astronomer and one of the first to realize the true vastness of the universe. His work led to the formulation of Hubble's Law, which states that the father away a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it is racing away...first evidence of the expansion of the universe.

(Incidentally, that last link will take you to the announcement of the most recent estimate of the age of the universe - about 13.7 billion years. Take that, Archbishop Ussher!)

The telescope has more than lived up to the exploratory spirit of its namesake. It has returned some of the most astonishing and fascinating pictures of stars, nebulae, galaxies, and other inhabitants of the universe. It has provided us with the first optical proof of the existence of black holes. It has helped unravel some of the diverse and complex processes that drive the birth and death of stars.

And it has peered farther than ever before, both into the distance and into time. For the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey, the telescope photographed a set of structures more than 13 billion light-years away; because a light-year is the distance traveled by light in one year, these pictures give us a view of a small slice of the universe as it looked more than 13 billion years ago.

Happy 16th birthday, Hubble. Let's hope they can keep you going.

[Photo courtesy of NASA.]