I turned in my manuscript for a final round of editing. Then I channel surfed, I landed on a documentary talking about the Hubble and the Webb telescopes. I remembered how beautiful the photos were last summer. I wanted to know more, so I looked up some information, here, paraphrased.
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a research space telescope, was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It is one of the largest and most versatile. The Hubble telescope is named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889–1953).
The Hubble telescope was funded and built in the 1970s. Its intended launch was in 1983, but the project was beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the 1986 Challenger disaster. Hubble was finally launched 1990, but its main mirror had been ground incorrectly, resulting in spherical aberration that compromised the telescope’s capabilities. After years of research, the optics were corrected to their intended quality by a servicing mission in 1993.
Hubble features a 7 ft 10-inch mirror. Its orbit outside the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere allows it to capture extremely high-resolution images than ground-based telescopes. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics. Hubble is the only telescope designed to be maintained in space by astronauts. Five Space Shuttle missions have repaired, upgraded, and replaced systems on the telescope. It is predicted to last until 2030–2040.
Hubble has helped resolve some long-standing problems in astronomy. One primary mission was the measure of the rate at which the universe is expanding, which is also related to its age. The estimated age is now about 13.7 billion years. Before the Hubble Telescope, scientists predicted an age ranging from 10 to 20 billion years.
The high-resolution spectra and images provided by the HST have established the prevalence of black holes in the center of nearby galaxies. Hubble has shown that black holes are probably common to the centers of all galaxies.
HST has also studied the dwarf planets Pluto, Eris, and Sedna. In the summer of 2012, U.S. astronomers discovered Styx, a tiny fifth moon orbiting Pluto.
In 2015, Hubble captured an image of the first-ever predicted reappearance of a supernova, dubbed ‘Refsdal.’ The light from the cluster took roughly five billion years to reach Earth, while the light from the supernova behind it took five billion more years than that.
In 2016, researchers using Hubble data announced the discovery of the farthest confirmed galaxy to date: GN-z11. Hubble observed as it existing roughly 400 million years after the Big Bang. (The universe as we know it started with an infinitely hot and dense single point that inflated and stretched — first at unimaginable speeds, and then at a more measurable rate — over the next 13.7 billion years to this day.)
In 2022 Hubble detected the light of the farthest individual star ever seen to date. The star, WHL0137-LS (nicknamed Earendel, existed within the first billion years after the big bang. (It will be observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to confirm Earendel is indeed a star.)
James Edwin Webb was the accomplished NASA administrator during the Apollo program. As the largest optical telescope in space, the high resolution and sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) allows it to view objects too old,
distant, or faint for The Hubble. JWST uses infrared astronomy. This enables observations of the first stars, the formation of the first galaxies, and detailed atmospheric charactieization of potentially habitlaible exoplanets.
Initial designs for JWST began in 1996, with potential launch in 2007 and $1 billion budget. However, it was completed in 2016, total cost $10 billion. JWST launched December 2021 and arrived at its destination in January 2022. First images released to the public by President Biden in July 2022.
The JWST has a 21 ft diameter gold-coated primary mirror made up of 18 separate hexagonal mirrors, over six times larger than the collecting area of Hubble’s 7.9 ft diameter mirror. The mirror has a gold coating to provide infrared reflectivity and this is covered by a thin layer of glass for durability. It is deployed in a solar orbit about 930,000 mi from Earth.
Within two weeks of the first Webb images, preprint papers described a wide range of early galaxies believed to date from 235 million years to 280 million years after the Big Bang, far earlier than previously known. (The results await peer review.) In August, 2022, NASA released a large mosaic image of 690 individual frames taken by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on JWST.
Astronomers also published the first detailed scientific results on the detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the gas giant exoplanet WASP-39b. Transmission observations obtained with JWST show the first confirmed detection of carbon dioxide on a planet outside the Solar System.
https://www.space.com/25126-big-bang-theory.html
