Hubble's digital archive delivers 10 to 20 gigabytes of data a day to astronomers all over the world. Astronomers have published 3,073 scientific papers on Hubble results. For the past 11 years, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has delivered stunning views of the cosmos. Here are some of Hubble's greatest moments. The orbiting observatory witnessed an invasion of Jupiter in 1994 as pieces of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunged into the planet's atmosphere and exploded.
Astronomers believe that planets form from the swirling debris around nascent stars.
The orbiting observatory provided visual proof that pancake-shaped dust disks around young stars are common, suggesting that the raw materials for planet formation are in place. The telescope also turned its attention to finding full-fledged planets far beyond our stellar neighborhood. Hubble probed the heart of a distant cluster of millions of stars and surprisingly found no planets. The bold and innovative observation pushed the telescope's capabilities to its limits, simultaneously scanning for small changes in the light from 35,000 stars in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae, located in the southern constellation Tucana. Hubble couldn't directly view the planets, but instead employed a powerful search technique in which the telescope measured the slight dimming of a star due to the passage of a planet in front of it, an event called a transit.