NASA celebrates Hubble Telescope’s 35th anniversary with breathtaking images from space
(April 2025) This month, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope will celebrate 35 years since its launch. During the 1970s, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) began planning for a space telescope that could transcend the blurring effects of the atmosphere and take clearer images of the Universe than ever before. In 1990 the idea finally became a reality and, despite a flaw in the main mirror which was quite swiftly corrected, Hubble has since far exceeded expectations.
It has delved deeper into the early years of the Universe than was ever thought possible, played a critical part in the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating and probed the atmospheres of planets around distant stars. As part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations, ESA shared new images that revisited stunning, previously released Hubble targets with the addition of the latest Hubble data and new processing techniques.
Hubble Visits Glittering Cluster,
Capturing Its Ultraviolet Light
ESA/Hubble released new images of NGC 346, the Sombrero Galaxy, and the Eagle Nebula earlier in the month. Now they are revisiting the star cluster Messier 72 (M72).
NGC 346
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Sombrero Galaxy
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Eagle Nebula
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M72
M72 is a collection of stars, formally known as a globular cluster, located in the constellation Aquarius roughly 50,000 light-years from Earth. The intense gravitational attraction between the closely packed stars gives globular clusters their regular, spherical shape. There are roughly 150 known globular clusters associated with the Milky Way galaxy.
The striking variety in the color of the stars in this image of M72, particularly compared to the original image, results from the addition of ultraviolet observations to the previous visible-light data. The colors indicate groups of different types of stars. Here, blue stars are those that were originally more massive and have reached hotter temperatures after burning through much of their hydrogen fuel; the bright red objects are lower-mass stars that have become red giants. Studying these different groups help astronomers understand how globular clusters, and the galaxies they were born in, initially formed.
Pierre Méchain, a French astronomer and colleague of Charles Messier, discovered M72 in 1780. It was the first of five star clusters that Méchain would discover while assisting Messier. They recorded the cluster as the 72nd entry in Messier’s famous collection of astronomical objects. It is also one of the most remote clusters in the catalog.
Happy 35th Anniversary Hubble!
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(Source: NASA)
(Cover photo: M72. Image credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, G. Piotto, M. Libralato)
Posted by Richard Webster, Ace News Today
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