Hubble celebrates anniversary with spectacular recording of a nebula; look

O Hubble Space Telescope celebrated, this Wednesday (24), 34 years since its launch. To celebrate the date, astronomers used the giant telescope to photograph the Little Dumbbell Nebulaalso known as Messier 76, M76 or NGC 650/651.

The image impresses with its detail and brightness, and shows a ring, seen from the side as the structure of the central bar, and two lobes at each opening of the ring.

Considered photogenic by amateur astrophotographers, this nebula was recorded for the first time in 1891, when it was discovered that it was a nebula rather than a galaxy or a star cluster.

34 years of Hubble

The Hubble Telescope was a revolutionary instrument for understanding the universe, having been responsible for providing unprecedented images and extremely important data for the development of studies in the areas of astronomy and astrophysics.

Over the course of more than three decades, the telescope allowed the observation of hitherto unknown structures of the universe, and remains operational to this day, recording several spatial phenomena that are fundamental to the creation of a cosmological model, now considered standard.

According to the astrophysicist at the National Observatory, Dr. Eduardo Telles, the telescope orbits approximately 600 kilometers from Earth, and since its launch on April 24, 1990, it has undergone four maintenance operations that have enabled several updates to its technology, thus allowing the increasingly refined capture of new information about the universe.

In addition to the circumstantial motivations of the period in which the telescope was being designed, the scientific reason for the creation and launch of Hubble consisted, according to Dr. Eduardo, in the identification of Cepheids, pulsating stars that make it possible to measure distances in the universe.

The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 was the result of a long history marked by scientific advances, international cooperation and the search for understanding the secrets of the universe.

Source: Byte Editorial