Hubble turns 30 this year: how astronomers will celebrate

Astronomers kicked off 2020 by welcoming the 30th anniversary of NASA’s venerable Hubble

Space Telescope at their largest annual gathering. During the first full day of the 235th American Astronomical Society conference, a team of scientists affiliated with the instrument shared their highlights from the mission. Hubble has produced not just scientific results, but also a host of iconic images of the universe around us.

“We flooded the world with jaw-dropping pictures,” Ray Villard, a long-time public affairs officer working on Hubble for the Space Telescope Science Institute that runs it, said during the event. “These pictures, they really have redefined the universe for the public, and they speak to the public at a visceral and emotional level that is far beyond the scientific understanding.”

And as scientists emphasised throughout the presentation, many of Hubble’s impacts couldn’t have been predicted when the instrument launched. Take, for example, exoplanets, of which zero had been identified at Hubble’s launch in 1990. Now scientists know of more than 4,000 such distant worlds, and the space telescope has been a vital tool for studying and identifying them.

Hubble has been key for directly imaging exoplanets, Nikole Lewis, an astrophysicist at Cornell University, said during the event. Scientists have never actually seen most of the exoplanets they have discovered, except for those that have been directly imaged – and Hubble’s data archives are allowing scientists to see more of these worlds.

“These were basically images that were taken before we knew those planets were there,” Lewis said. “We were able to dig back into the archives of data and find planets that were just buried before.” That research can continue even after Hubble’s eventual demise.