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The Kalamazoo Astronomical Society Remembers Hubble's 25th Birthday

NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team

Twenty five years ago, the Hubble Space telescope deployed into orbit around the Earth and changed the way we saw space. It got close up shots of planets and moons and peered into the deepest parts of the universe. To commemorate the occasion, the Kalamazoo Astronomical Society is bringing in astrophysicist Frank Summers of the Space Telescope Science Institute for a talk about the Hubble on April 25th at 7 p.m. at the Kalamazoo Nature Center. WMUK's Robbie Feinberg caught up with him from his office in Maryland.

ROBBIE FEINBERG: So Frank, Hubble’s been around for 25 years now. But take us back. I know that simply getting a telescope into space was a huge accomplishment. But what made Hubble so special?

FRANK SUMMERS, SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE:  The Hubble Space Telescope was the first of NASA’s program called the Great Observatories. The telescopes that had gone before the Hubble were special purpose telescopes. They went up to solve one particular problem. They did a limited set of observations covering a very specific field. Hubble, as a great observatory, is a general purpose observatory in space. So it wasn’t designed just to solve one problem. It was designed to solve many different problems from many different fields. So Hubble looks at planets. It looks at stars. It looks at nebulae. It looks at galaxies. It looks all across the universe. And by doing that, it has a much larger impact on astronomy because it really impacts all the different fields of astronomy in a way that previous telescopes hadn’t done.

FEINBERG: Can you give a few examples of some discoveries that people might not realize?

SUMMERS: I can easily off the top of my head pick out a few that are interesting. In particular, the New Horizons mission is going to fly past Pluto this July. And we really can’t see Pluto very well from Earth. It’s very small and very far away. It took Hubble’s resolution to really be able to separate Pluto and it’s primary moon, Charon. Or some would call it a double-planet, Pluto and Charon. But in preparation for the New Horizons mission, Hubble was able to examine the system in even greater detail and Hubble found four more moons around Pluto. With Hubble’s resolution, it can find these moons and allow, it allows the New Horizons mission when it goes past Pluto in July to not have just two targets but six targets.

SUMMERS (cont'd): So that’s just one example from the solar system. We can also look at star clusters where Hubble can see the details of stars in these very dense regions where the stars are crowded so close together where they’re blurred together from the ground. But Hubble can then resolve the individual stars. The same thing for galaxies. Hubble can look at galaxy clusters and see the details within galaxies. But it can also look to the edge of the universe. It can see the faintest and smallest and very, very distant galaxies that no other telescope can see. 

FEINBERG: So how does the future look for Hubble? I know we’ve got a new telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope coming up in 2018. What’s that going to mean?

SUMMERS: It has always been our hope that Hubble would last at least until 2020. So that we can have Hubble and JWST up there at the same time doing simultaneous observations, complementary observations.  What you have to recognize is that JWST is an infrared telescope. It’s like the son of Hubble and Spitzer. Spitzer is our current infrared telescope. But it’s not a very large telescope. So it doesn’t have the very high resolution that Hubble does. JWST will have Hubble’s resolution, but the infrared wavelengths of Spitzer, and provide the best of both to do science that neither one of them can do right now.

SUMMERS (cont'd): We’ve also got exoplanets. Planets around other stars. These planets form in these dark, dusty disks. And these disks are opaque to visible light. Infrared light, with those longer wavelengths, can penetrate inside those disks and see more detail of the formation of stars and planets. So those are two of the main science topics that JWST can solve that no other telescope can solve.

FEINBERG: The really interesting thing to me about the Hubble is the role it plays for kids born ten years ago or even today. And seeing its really elegant photographs of space is kind of like that “Man on the Moon” moment that inspired so many kids to go into science fifty years ago. What do you think of that?

SUMMERS: In my lifetime, there have been sort of three major NASA ideas that have floated in the public. First, I grew up watching the moon landings. I was really young when people landed on the moon. But that was a seminal moment. Then, for me, it was the exploration of the solar system with the Voyager missions. Going out and taking the tiny dots of light and making them worlds in themselves. And then in the nineties, Hubble sort of took over and provided visions of the universe that the public hadn’t really seen before. There had always been great astronomical photographs, but with the rise of Hubble and the rise of the internet, there was a perfect storm of getting these beautiful images out to the internet. We’re 25 years into Hubble, and we have astronomers now taking observations with Hubble who grew up, they were in their teens when Hubble was first launched and saw those first images. Then they went to their high school and college and graduate school. Now they’re doing observations with the telescope that inspired them.

FEINBERG: As a scientist yourself, that must be part of what keeps you doing what you do.

SUMMERS: I get really enthusiastic about showing people, there are immense possibilities out there in the universe. There is a whole cool set of ideas that aren’t possible here on Earth. I’m talking about black holes. I’m talking about galaxies that are crashing together. These are the sorts of things that allow your imagination to soar. And the Hubble images give this artistic bump to it, so you can take these ideas and illustrate them in amazing ways.

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