Spectacular revelations with the kind permission of Hubble

Science

NASA

Astronauts made five trips to Hubble to repair and upgrade his equipment. John Grunsfeld, known as Hubble Repairman, performed three of these missions, to a telescope the size of a school bus, orbiting 300 miles above the Earth.

JOHN GRUNSFELD: Almost everything we can change and improve

BILL WHITAKER: The operation of the telescope, all this has been transformed.

JOHN GRUNSFELD: Yes. It's like a new telescope.

BILL WHITAKER: On your last mission, you step out of the airlock and you have that big smile on your face.

JOHN GRUNSFELD: I thought, you know, I can not imagine any where I'd rather be than outside the space shuttle in my space suit next to the Hubble Space Telescope . I was so happy.

Hubble has changed what we know of the universe – its structure, its evolution, its age – 13.8 billion years. Hubble showed us the wonder and majesty of the nascent stars.

AMBER STRAUGHN: This is a region of gas and dust that produces new stars. And now we have learned with Hubble, not only stars, but also baby planet systems.

BILL WHITAKER: Most of these stars have planets surrounding them?

AMBER STRAUGHN: Most stars actually have planets. When I was small, we only knew the planets inside our solar system. And now we know that planets are absolutely everywhere.

Astronomer Heidi Hammel specializes in Hubble's work within our solar system. With the telescope, she saw huge fragments of a comet slamming into Jupiter creating giant impacts.

HEIDI HAMMEL: When I heard that a comet was going to hit Jupiter, my reaction was, "Hey, what's that? When I saw the first site of impact and that it was huge and dark, I was amazed: it was there that the comet fell on the planet to a such speed that it caused an explosion, the equivalent of several million HEIDI HAMMEL: The Earth has the size of this ring, and if this event had occurred on Earth, it would have ..

BILL WHITAKER: We left.

HEIDI HAMMEL: Yes, we call it an event that changes the biosphere, which means we would be gone.

Hubble revolves around the Earth's atmosphere to see a broad spectrum of light that our atmosphere is blocking. You can see dazzling displays like this halo glowing on Jupiter. 9006] HEIDI HAMMEL: In the northern hemisphere, you see glowing aurorae. A dawn occurs when the planet's magnetic field has charged particles that interact with the upper atmosphere. What you see here are particles charged with the sun. They are swept in the powerful magnetic field of Jupiter. And then it's reflected in that flicker that you see inside the aurora borealis.

BILL WHITAKER: And you could not see that with a terrestrial telescope?

HEIDI HAMMEL: You could never see these aurora borealis because our atmosphere has an ozone layer that absorbs ultraviolet light.

Hubble also found a similar blue tint to the background of Saturn. The most iconic image of the telescope is this: the pillars of creation, a place of stellar reproduction. Amber Straughn showed us how the Hubble Enhanced Infrared Camera was made three years ago.

AMBER STRAUGHN: Stars are born inside these clouds of dust. And that will give you an idea of ​​why the infrared is so important because in the infrared light, what you see are the stars that shine through.

BILL WHITAKER: You see the stars inside. What is the size of this cloud zone?

AMBER STRAUGHN: From top to bottom, these pillars are about ten light years away, 60 trillion miles

BILL WHITAKER: 60 trillion miles

AMBER STRAUGHN: Yes. The space is big.

"Great" and miraculous with constant celestial regeneration. Straughn calls this "the image of everything" because you can see old stars explode – and new stars form.

AMBER STRAUGHN: Whenever you see these kinds of dark and murky regions, you can imagine that there are stars that are born there.

BILL WHITAKER: Where are the dying stars?

AMBER STRAUGHN: And the dying stars, we think it could explode any day, literally, or it could be in a thousand years. But short-term among astronomers –

BILL WHITAKER: At cosmic time, any day.

AMBER STRAUGHN: Yes. The big stars, when they die, explode and send their contents into the surrounding universe. And these contents are what germs future stars and future planets and helps to sow life, finally. The iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were literally forged inside a star that ended its life like that.

BILL WHITAKER: We are all star dusts.

AMBER STRAUGHN: We are literally star dusts. We are viscerally made of stars. One of the things that I find remarkable about this picture is that it shows how the universe is colorful.

BILL WHITAKER: This looks like contemporary art.

AMBER STRAUGHN: It is a very closely related star group. And what you see here is about 100,000 stars. This was one of the first images that Hubble's new camera, installed in 2009, was one of the first images she took.

The blue stars are the youngest and hottest. The white and yellow stars, like our sun, are mid-life; while the red stars are the oldest and the coolest. John Grunsfeld has a claim to fame. He is the last human to have touched Hubble. He gave him a farewell nod

BILL WHITAKER: Hubble had to live 15 years. It has now been 27. How long can Hubble last?

JOHN GRUNSFELD: I am reasonably confident that it will continue for another three to five years.

This means that for a while at least, Hubble will work in tandem with his successor, the much larger James Webb telescope should be launched in 2021. Webb should be able to detect light from the earliest galaxies. The farthest that Hubble can see is this red drop, a galaxy 400 million years after the Big Bang. Webb should bring us closer to the beginning of time.

JOHN GRUNSFELD: The James Webb Space Telescope was therefore specifically designed to see the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe. So we will see the snapshot of the beginning of the stars. When galaxies started The very first moments of the universe. And my bet? There will be big surprises.

Produced by Robert G. Anderson, Aaron Weisz and William Harwood.