The News
After 35 years in orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope continues to push astronomy forward.
Launched in April 1990, the Hubble was then the most powerful space telescope ever, with a hitherto unheard-of 2.4-meter starlight-gathering mirror. Since then, the telescope has revealed supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies, captured jets of water shooting from Jupiter’s moon Europa, and unveiled the fate of the Milky Way — to crash into its neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, in a few billion years.
It has also taken “some of the most iconic space photographs we have,” Scientific American noted, including the Pillars of Creation.
Its aging hardware is failing, but it’s still working: Hubble recently discovered that Uranus’ day was 28 seconds longer than believed.