April 24 One day like today but 20 years ago, NASA launched the space one of the telescopes has given more joy to the scientific community: the Hubble. 20 years and this telescope is scanning the universe conscientiously work through which we could admire in great detail, from planets to stars passing by galaxies or nebulae, and got to know more about space and what it spends.
Due to its 20th anniversary everyone is congratulating the Hubble in different ways (Google has dedicated the
doodle from today for example) and this, although we commend a few days ago, we would not be less and we repeat today congratulated this second post. Specifically I will recalling his five most important discoveries , so without further delay I leave with supermassive black holes interesting .
By the year 1915 the great
Albert Einstein predicted by mathematical formulas the existence of black holes, but no one had been able to get confirmation until 94. In that year our protagonist found something that had a mass equivalent to 3,000 suns in the galaxy M87, “that something” was a supermassive black hole. The Hubble had obtained the first evidence confirming the story as pointed out by Einstein .
But Hubble’s discoveries related to black holes continued. In 96 a group of NASA scientists to an important conclusion reached by Hubble images:
almost all the large galaxies in the universe are “capped” by a supermassive black hole at its center (also ours, Pointing ).
true age of the universe
In the 1920s the astronomer
Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe expands and made the famous “Hubble constant” describing the universe’s expansion rate and age. It was a milestone that years later “polished” the Hubble (rightly so named in honor of Edwin) to allow scientists to specify in its images much was made years ago by Edwin Hubble . The final conclusion was that our universe has an age of 13,500 million years .
evidence of dark energy
There was something scientists had long yearned and was not otherwise be able to see what was happening in deep space, which was finally achieved with the Hubble .
These comments were a real booty. Thanks to them we found evidence that supported what Einstein also predicted years ago:
the universe is filled with a form of energy called dark energy, which is causing the galaxies are separated from each other constantly (or put another way, is the force that makes the universe expand ).
Thus was born a planet
Another of the great moments of Hubble arrived in 2005 when
caught the first phase leading to a planet , specifically imaged as a disk of gas and dust around a newborn star was becoming more dense, allowing the matter eventually be aggregated to give rise to a new planet.
and found the first organic molecule in an exoplanet
When Hubble does not miss anything, not the smallest. So much so that in 2008, for the first time,
came with an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized exoplanet, HD 189733b . The discovery was important and was a step forward in the aim of achieving identify prebiotic molecules in the atmospheres of planets located in the “habitable zones” around other stars .
Via: NASA – HubbleSite | Images: HubbleSite
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