Friday, April 24 marks the 25th anniversary of when the world-famous Hubble Space Telescope was first launched into space.
This revolutionary telescope, which uses a series of high-resolution cameras to observe the visible universe, has sparked the awe of the public with its stunning images and captured the hearts of the scientific community with its wealth of data.
From the mysterious nature of dark matter to the birth of stars and the atmospheric composition of exoplanets, Hubble has taught us about the many dazzling wonders of our universe during its 25 years in space.
To commemorate Hubble's 25th anniversary, NASA released this jaw-dropping shot of some of our galaxy's hottest, brightest, most massive stars contained in the giant cluster at the center of this image. The powerful winds the stars in this cluster generate have hurricane-like force that pushes the surrounding gas away, which is the beautiful cloud of purple, blue and orange you see to the left and bottom.
In 2006, Hubble set its sites on the mesmerizing Orion Nebula and discovered 16 planets nuzzled within its beautiful confines. Before the Kepler Spacecraft launched in 2009 and began searching the galaxy for exoplanets, the number of known planets outside of our solar system was limited. This Hubble discovery was a momentous find that strongly hinted at the prevalence of planets throughout our universe.
What you're seeing at the center of this Hubble image is a very important type of luminous star called a Cepheid variable. Before Hubble, astronomers had only a vague idea of the age of the universe. But by using the patterns by which these stars brighten and dim over short periods of time, astronomers obtained extremely accurate distances to these objects, which helped them pin down the 14-billion-year age of the universe.
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