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9.4: HST Achievements

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HST Achievements

So, what are the Hubble Space Telescope’s greatest achievements since its 1990 launch? As a summary of some of the many HST achievements:

  • Determine the rate the Universe is expanding, and that expansion rate is accelerating
  • The range of the age of the Universe
  • Discovery and confirmation of galactic nuclei supermassive black holes
  • Discovery and observations of proto-planetary disks – called proplyds – in the Great Orion Nebula
  • Stellar systems forming, and planets around other stars
  • Observations of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s collision with Jupiter
  • Solar System observations
  • The Universe is thick with galaxies

As you can see, the Hubble Space Telescope has had a rich — and sometimes troubling — history.

Within the Nebula, new stars are condensing out of interstellar clouds. The young stars in turn light up the surrounding cloud, exciting atoms in the cloud into radiating light.
The Orion Nebula, as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope [” Hubble 2006 mosaic 18000 ” by NASA, ESA, M. Robberto, in the Public Domain ]

This page titled 9.4: HST Achievements is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Lumen Learning.

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