Modest but Momentous: Hubble’s Brilliant, Unsung Images [Slide Show]
NASA’s iconic space telescope has delivered gorgeous astronomical pictures for a quarter century, but some of its keystone discoveries come from far more humble images. Here are Scientific American’s top 10
![Modest but Momentous: Hubble’s Brilliant, Unsung Images [Slide Show]](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/427B1288-F96A-45F9-AC54E999F9A2D97B.jpg?w=590&h=393)
Modest but Momentous: Hubble’s Brilliant, Unsung Images [Slide Show]
- Spying on a Supermassive Black Hole / The Supermassive Black Hole in M84 One of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most famous discoveries is that nearly all galaxies harbor supermassive black holes at their centers, each containing millions or even billions of times the sun’s mass... Credit: NASA, ESA, Gary Bower, Richard Green (NOAO) and the STIS Instrument Definition Team
- Seeing Light from a Long Time Ago / The Galaxy Behind Abell 2744 The galaxy cluster Abell 2744 is so gargantuan that its gravitational field amplifies the light of far-distant background galaxies, allowing the otherwise-invisible objects to be seen. .. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer and the HFF Team (STScI)
- Calibrating the Cosmic Distance Ladder / The Cepheid Variable Star SY Aurigae Cepheid variable stars—very bright stars with well-known luminosities—can be seen in nearby galaxies, and form the bottom rung of the “cosmic distance ladder,” an assemblage of methods for estimating intergalactic distances... Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Riess et al. (STScI, JHU, UC–Berkeley)
- Measuring The Age of the Universe / White Dwarfs in Globular Cluster NGC 6397 White dwarfs—the inert, burnt-out remnants of stars like our sun—are some of the most perfect cosmic clocks, and can be used to set lower bounds on the age of the universe. .. Credit: NASA, ESA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia)
- Testing General Relativity with a White Dwarf / The White Dwarf Sirius B The nearest, closest white dwarf is Sirius B. At only 8.6 light-years away, Sirius B would be an ideal candidate for in-depth study to increase our understanding of white dwarfs, except it also happens to orbit Sirius A—the brightest star in the nighttime sky... Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Bond (STScI) and M. Barstow (University of Leicester)
- Discovering Elusive Brown Dwarfs / The Brown Dwarf Gliese 229B Since the 1960s, theorists had postulated the existence of brown dwarfs—objects that are too big and hot to be planets, but too small and cold to be stars. No one had ever seen one until the mid-1990s, however, when astronomers began finding them in images taken by high-powered telescopes... Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Kulkarni (Caltech) and D.Golimowski (JHU)
- Sniffing an Exoplanet’s Atmosphere / The Transiting Exoplanet HD 209458 b The exoplanet HD 209458 b was discovered in 1999 by the gravitational wobble it raised on its sunlike star, located 150 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Measurements of the size and period of the wobble revealed the planet to be about 70 percent of the mass of Jupiter, in a scorching 3.5-day orbit of the star... Credit: NASA, ESA, Brown et al. (NCAR, CfA, STScI, University of Arizona)
- Finding a New Target for New Horizons / The Kuiper Belt Object 1110113Y In July 2015 NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Pluto and its moons, completing the preliminary reconnaissance of our solar system that began with the first interplanetary missions of the 1960s... Credit: NASA, ESA, SwRI, JHU/APL and the New Horizons KBO Search Team
- Exploring a Soggy Outer Solar System / Jupiter’s Moon Europa In the search for extraterrestrial life astrobiologists are increasingly eager to move beyond dry, desolate Mars and more closely examine the frigid, ice-locked moons of the outer solar system, some of which harbor subsurface seas... Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Roth et al (SwRI, MSFC, JHU, UC–Santa Cruz and University of Cologne, Germany)
- The Debris Disk of HD 181327 / Tracking Epic Exoplanetary Collisions The shattered leftovers of planet formation tend to be scattered around a star in belts and rings of dust called “debris disks.” Astronomers used to believe that all debris disks would look more or less the same, manifesting as largely featureless pancakes of diffuse material whirling around a star... Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Schneider (University of Arizona), and the HST/GO 12228 Team
