Hubble: Eye of the Sky Episode 3: Time Machine

What we see with a telescope is light coming from billions of light-years away, so the farther we look, the closer we get to when the Big Bang happened, and how the universe came into being.

The Webb telescope is groundbreaking because it has different functions from the Hubble Space Telescope, and the equipment we have, much more powerful than ever, will find that nothing is almost impossible to predict today.

Tune in to Episode 3 of the Hubble: Eyes in the Sky series: Time Machine, Subtitled: Wow.

Hubble's achievements include a space image called "deep field," which took a long time to capture, with one exposure time of 11.2 days, and Hubble data using 400 orbits to capture the image, an average of 15 orbits per day. The photos taken are surprising, there are thousands of galaxies there.

The Hubble Space Telescope is an excellent time machine, and one of the things that's important for research with the Hubble Space Telescope is to realize that when we look at a galaxy, we see what it was millions or even billions of years ago, and that light signals take so long to come to us.

What Hubble reveals is that the universe has actually been changing over billions of years, and that the early galaxies, the very distant galaxies we see, are simple, and sometimes they look chaotic and small, and have not yet had time to form that magnificent spiral structure.

Over time, we see galaxies actually merge with other galaxies, getting bigger and bigger, and these mergers look like train accident scenes in the Hubble image, and Hubble was able to capture these very, very deep exposures that allowed us to see the edge of the universe, 13.5 billion light-years away.

When We first designed and envisioned Hubble, we never thought it could see that far, thanks to the constant advances in the instruments we installed on the telescope, coupled with the ingenuity of the scientists, who came up with very interesting observational models for these real deep exposures, where we were just waiting for one orbit after another to collect photons.

When Hubble observes these regions of galaxies, we sometimes also see galaxy clusters, which are galaxies that are close to each other by gravity, and their masses are so massive that they can distort space-time.

In some observations, our purpose is to find gravitational lensing, through which the light of some very early galaxies that were originally too faint to be observed could be magnified by more than 10 times, which allowed us to observe faint galaxies in the very early universe.

Some of what Hubble is doing now is preparing for the new James Webb Telescope, which is expected to launch on December 18, 2021, when Hubble and James Webb will operate simultaneously for many years, observing all the information from ultraviolet to infrared, which will bring us a series of new understandings of the universe.