NEW YORK: NASA has released the third video in a series of videos celebrating Hubble Telescope’s 25th anniversary. Titled, “Expect the Unexpected”, the newly released video explains how the Hubble unlocked some of the biggest mysteries of the universe and a lot more.
In 2002, Hubble was outfitted with the powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys. Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland assembled a team of astronomers and used Hubble to find 25 more supernovae whose light had been traveling for many billions of years.
The measurements derived from the most distant of these supernovae undercut theories about less energetic stellar explosions or dust between galaxies dimming the supernovae. The Hubble observations fit only with the model of an accelerating universe, spurred by the power of dark energy.
Dark energy is not the only elusive mystery of the universe Hubble has tackled.
“A supermassive black hole is where the equivalent of several hundred thousand stars or a million, or 10 million stars like our sun have been crammed into a region of space smaller than a pencil point,” said Holland Ford, a research professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.
