,,Thirty Years Of Stardom

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. Think
about the breathtaking images you’ve seen of space–
swirling, multicolored galaxies, shining star clusters, far-off
planets. There’s a good chance these photos were taken by
the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has helped us better
understand space mysteries, like black holes, warped
space, exoplanets, and the expansion of the universe.
30 years ago today, Hubble was launched into space. And
through multiple repair jobs right from its very beginning, it’s
the orbiting observatory that just keeps on going. To
celebrate this anniversary, we’re joined today by Dr. Jennifer
Wiseman, senior project scientist for the Hubble Space
Telescope in Greenbelt, Maryland. Welcome to Science
Friday.
JENNIFER WISEMAN: Thank you.
IRA FLATOW: Do you remember the beginnings of
Hubble when it was launched in 1990? You were
studying to become an astrophysicist, right? It must
have been exciting times.
JENNIFER WISEMAN: Oh, it was exciting. I was studying for
a graduate degree in astronomy up at the Harvard
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And we were all very
excited about this new idea of having a telescope on a
space-based platform. So it would be above the Earth’s
atmosphere and would provide much clearer views of deep
space. We were in high anticipation.
IRA FLATOW: Tell me what the anticipation was like.
What were you expecting to get out of this new
telescope?

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Well, we weren’t sure, actually. We
were excited because we didn’t know exactly what it would
bring us. We just knew it would bring us more, better
information, perhaps even change the kinds of questions
we’d be asking about the universe.
Now, I myself was studying a different kind of astronomy. I
was using radio telescopes, the big dish kinds of telescopes
that collect low-energy radiation from regions where stars
are forming. But all of us, no matter what kinds of astronomy
we were specializing in, were really excited about this new
that was going to open up vistas and new questions.
We were particularly interested in what the telescope would
tell us about deep space, very distant, faint galaxies that
had been impossible, really, to see up to that point. But we
were also curious about what it would tell us about our own
solar system and nearby star systems as well.
IRA FLATOW: You know, to me, Hubble is one of NASA’s
greatest triumphs because it brought outer space closer to
everybody here at home. And some of the images– virtually
all of the images– were just fantastic things we had never
seen before. Do you have a favorite Hubble achievement
or discovery or an image?
JENNIFER WISEMAN: I have many favorites. That’s like
asking someone which child is your favorite. But I think the
one that actually always stirs my soul when I look at it is
something we call the Ultra-Deep Field. Now, this is an
image that was taken by pointing the Hubble Space
Telescope in a direction of the sky where there aren’t many
nearby stars to drown out the image and just collecting light
for many days so that the faintest objects would show up in
the resulting image.
This resulting image is basically a collection of thousands of
galaxies, these smudges of light that when you look at them

you see spirals. You see sphericals. You see all kinds of
galaxies in this tiny little field in the sky and realize that our
universe is magnificent. It’s enormous.
If you can extrapolate in your mind that image over the
whole sky, you realize visually what it means when we say
there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our observable
universe. And I like to imagine being able to suddenly blink
my eyes and travel to any one of those galaxies and look
around. If we were that far away looking back, our own
Milky Way would look like one of those spiral smudges of
light.
And then, of course, some of those galaxies are more
distant than others. So one of the big challenges of
astronomy is to measure distances to different things in
space. And astronomers have very carefully been mapping
out the distances to these various galaxies and finding out
how the universe has changed over time because, of
course, we’re looking at these galaxies as they were when
the light left them to begin its journey across vast distances
of space to get to our telescope.
And so some of these galaxies are millions of light years– a
light year is the distance that light travels in one year. Some
of these galaxies are shining to us for millions of years in the
distant past. And some are shining from billions of years,
really toward the very beginning of our universe when
galaxies were first starting to form.
So we can compare those very distant galaxies and the way
they look and their compose– their nature with galaxies like
our own and really see how the universe has changed over
time. And that, to me, is fascinating.
IRA FLATOW: The idea of putting a telescope in space–
an observatory in space, I guess, offers advantages over
having one on the ground here.

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Of course. So the whole idea of
putting this telescope in orbit around the Earth is not to get
it closer to the things we’re observing, but to get it above
the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s only about 340 miles above the
surface of the Earth. But it’s high enough to get it above
most of our atmosphere and above the clouds. And we can
get much sharper images.
Light coming through the turbulent atmosphere of Earth can
get blurred. And also, our atmosphere actually filters out
some types of light that we would like to receive for
astronomy. That’s good for us. The ultraviolet light cannot
get through the atmosphere, and that’s helpful for our
health.
But we want to see ultraviolet light in astronomy. A lot of
objects in deep space emit interesting radiation in the
ultraviolet range of light. And Hubble can see that above the
Earth’s atmosphere. So that’s what’s been the
transformational change that we’ve had with the Hubble
Space Telescope and subsequent space telescopes.
IRA FLATOW: What are the questions that Hubble is still
investigating now?
JENNIFER WISEMAN: Well, that’s a great question because
some of the questions that Hubble was originally tasked to
address are still being investigated. One of those is, for
example, the expansion rate of the universe. The namesake
of Hubble, Edwin Hubble, helped us understand that the
universe itself is expanding. Space itself is stretching.
But what is the rate of that expansion? And how long has
this been going on? How old is the universe? That was one
of the original goals of Hubble. And Hubble did, in fact,
refine our understanding of that expansion rate of the
universe. And we’re still measuring that and refining that
with Hubble to this day.

In fact, Hubble helped provide us with a surprise, along with
some telescopes on the ground, when it deduced that in the
last few billion years that expansion rate of the universe has
been increasing. The expansion is accelerating. We didn’t
expect that because matter tends to pull things together,
not push things apart. But there’s something we call “dark
energy” accelerating that push of the universe’s expansion.
So that’s something we’re still studying with Hubble.
And we are also doing things with Hubble now that we
didn’t anticipate or even imagine when Hubble was
designed, such as studying exoplanets. These are planets
not in our own solar system, but planets orbiting stars
outside of our solar system. These exoplanets were not
known when I was starting graduate school. But now we
know of thousands of these systems because our
technology has improved.
They are generally detected by other kinds of telescopes,
telescopes on the ground and space telescopes like NASA’s
Kepler and test observatories. But then Hubble is the
pioneer at studying the composition of the atmospheres of
some of these exoplanets.
And right now we’re using Hubble to look at many of these
exoplanets to discern what’s in their atmospheres. And
we’re finding even water vapor in some of them. So these
are early steps toward really understanding what other star
systems are like. Those are just a couple of examples of
what we’re using Hubble for these days.
IRA FLATOW: Speaking of exoplanets, there’s this story
about a spooky exoplanet that Hubble found and now is
not there anymore. It wasn’t what we thought it was.
Explain that one.
JENNIFER WISEMAN: Oh, this is just a great story of how
science is dynamic. We discover things. But when we keep

studying them, we find out more and more. And this is a
really intriguing exoplanet or what we thought was an
exoplanet system around the star Fomalhaut. And
Fomalhaut is a star that has a ring of debris around it. It’s
always shown some evidence of having material, perhaps
planets, orbiting that star.
But Fomalhaut B, which was, we thought, and might still
think is one of these planets in the Fomalhaut system, was
detected some years back with Hubble. It was observed in
an image. And it’s very hard to image exoplanets because
they’re generally very faint around other stars. We typically
detect exoplanets in more indirect ways.
But this one we had an image from Hubble. And it’s a really
beautiful and striking picture of an object orbiting a star, or
so we thought. But over the years, a team of astronomers
have been looking at the data and looking at more Hubble
observations and seeing that this object seems to be fading
over time, dissipating in a sense. It’s always been a little
unusual because it didn’t shine as brightly in infrared light as
we would have expected for a true exoplanet.
So this new team is hypothesizing that what we might be
seeing is actually the result of the debris, if you will, of a
collision in that system of two smaller planetesimals. And
that dust cloud that was kicked up by that collision is what
we were seeing. And it’s now dissipating over time.
And so that is a very cool finding. And of course, we’ll be
looking at this system more and more just to see what’s
happening and to further understand what’s happening in
that other dynamic star system.
IRA FLATOW: A lot of technology has changed in the 30
years that Hubble’s been up there. Is Hubble still good
enough for 2020?

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Well, this is the amazing thing. We’ve
had Hubble for three decades now. And yet, truly, Hubble is
more scientifically powerful and productive now than ever
before in its mission. And we anticipate Hubble will keep
giving us cutting-edge science for the next decade, maybe
beyond.
The reason for this good news is at least twofold. One is
that we’ve had a series of astronaut servicing missions over
the years. You may remember the dramatic launch of
Hubble, which was via the Space Shuttle back in 1990, and
then its dramatic first servicing mission that corrected some
errors in Hubble’s optics in 1993.
Since then, we’ve had wonderful vision with Hubble. And
we’ve had several servicing missions with astronauts
repairing equipment or putting in new and improved
cameras and instruments on Hubble. That’s kept Hubble at
the forefront of capability. So it’s like getting a new
observatory every time.
The last time we did a Space Shuttle servicing mission was
in 2009. And this mission was extremely successful. We had
new refreshing batteries and gyroscopes. A couple of
science instruments were repaired. And then we had two
new science instruments installed. So we have a wonderful
observatory now that’s still in fantastic technical shape.
And also, astronomers are using those instruments in the
observatory in new, clever ways to get better and better
science out of it. So because of that, we’re getting new and
more interesting results, perhaps, than ever before. We’re
getting more professional, peer-reviewed science papers
out of Hubble than ever before. And we have a real positive
sense of what we’re going to learn from Hubble in these
coming years.

IRA FLATOW: I’m Ira Flatow, and this is Science Friday from
WNYC Studios. Many more years do you think Hubble
can operate for?
JENNIFER WISEMAN: Well, that’s the question of the hour.
And that’s hard to give a firm prediction. NASA has
committed to supporting Hubble as long as it’s being
scientifically productive. And right now, it’s very productive.
We are entertaining proposals from astronomers around the
world every year. We think that the batteries and
gyroscopes are in good shape.
And we have a real clever, wonderful team of engineers and
technical experts on the ground here at NASA’s Goddard
Space Flight Center and also at the Space Telescope
Science Institute in Baltimore that are constantly monitoring
these instruments and using them in the most productive
ways. And from the rough predictions of looking at how
healthy these components seem to be, we’re hopeful that
Hubble will be giving us a very good scientific return for
throughout this decade and maybe beyond.
And this is really good news because Hubble is terrific on its
own. But it’s also very powerful when used in complement
with other observatories and probes, such as the James
Webb Space Telescope, which is another space facility with
different capabilities that we anticipate launching in 2021.
IRA FLATOW: Why do you think with all the wonderful
telescopes around the world that Hubble is the one that
people talk about?
JENNIFER WISEMAN: That’s a great question. So the
Hubble Space Telescope has really become a household a
friend for people around the world. And I think there are
several reasons for that. One is its dramatic beginning back
in the early 1990s. Its launch from the Space Shuttle was
momentous.

And then it was quickly realized that at first, Hubble’s
images were disappointing. There was a realization that the
magnificent 2.4-meter mirror inside Hubble was slightly
misshapen. It was beautifully ground but slightly misshapen
in its formula. And so this was kind of embarrassing for
NASA. It was a disappointment to astronomers. And this
was a bad way to get your name known around the world.
But because of that, its dramatic repair mission in 1993 was
watched by people around the world. And when the results
of that mission were so successful, people were cheering
around the world. So that, again, reinforced the name of
Hubble around the world.
And then the early images after that first repair mission were
surprising and dramatic. One of them was when Comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. It fell apart into this
series of fragments that impacted Jupiter one by one. And
the Hubble Telescope caught this dramatic impact. And how
memorable is that? That’s something that really only Hubble
could capture in that kind of detail. So that reinforced the
name of Hubble.
And then the most dramatic images that are of most interest
to the public are easily accessible also in the galleries on our
websites. And I think that people appreciate that. They’re
able to share in the awe and wonder of looking at these
images of galaxies, of stars, of these beautiful, colorful
nebulae where stars are still forming. And I’m pleased that
the mission has set a standard for making these
observations and data easily available and enjoyable
worldwide.
IRA FLATOW: Wow. We have run out of time. There’s so
much stuff to talk about with the Hubble. I want to wish you
and congratulate you and wish everybody a happy 30th
anniversary for the Hubble." Summarize this text and write article with important informations