Today’s Google Doodle set up aims to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble telescope. For the occasion, Google has setup a large logo which takes up the entire width of your screen.
Google has also setup a Hubble Gallery to promote Google Earth.
The Hubble telescope is a telescope placed in orbit about 600 km altitude, it makes a full rotation of the Earth every 100 minutes. His name was given in honor of the astronomer Edwin Hubble. Launched April 24, 1990 by a spacecraft, it is the result of long research work at NASA and the European Space Agency.
The Hubble telescope has an optical resolution better than 0.1 arcsec. Its replacement is planned for 2014 and this will be the James Webb Space Telescope.
The Hubble telescope has already made some discoveries:
- In 1994, images of the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter.
- The evidence of planets orbiting stars other than our Sun.
- The dark matter in our galaxy is not composed entirely of small faint star.
- Some of the observations leading to the current model of the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
- Theory arguing that most galaxies contain black holes at their centers.
- In December 1995, Hubble photographed the Hubble Deep Field, an area covering a 30-millionth of the sky and containing several thousand galaxies. Another image, but the southern sky, also has been done and is very similar, reinforcing the theory that the universe is uniform at large scale and that the Earth occupies any place in the universe.
[Info via Wikipedia ]
