It has been eye candy from heaven, with the black expanse of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. We thought we knew about Neptune and other neighbors. The stars can be seen by the penetrating eyes of the space telescope.
The telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. After two trouble-plagued decades and $10 billion, it was launched on Christmas one year ago on a mission to observe the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror was 21 feet wide. One hour of observing time on the telescope can cost up to $19,000.
Not everyone is complaining that NASA and the astronomer paid all that money for pretty pictures.
The first images were just the beginning, according to Nancy Levenson, the interim director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. There is more that needs to be done to turn them into science.
The first results from the telescope were discussed and heard by over 200 people in an auditorium at the institute. According to the organizers, there were more than 300 online watchers. The event was a celebration of the success of the launch and inauguration.
Astronomers marched to the podium and spoke quickly to obey the 12 minute limit. They had already created black holes. Some of the rocky exoplanets are located around a red dwarf star. At least two of the exoplanets lack the bulky primordial hydrogen atmospheres that would choke off life as we know it, but they may have skimpy atmospheres of denser molecule like water.
Bjorn Benneke of the University of Montreal said that they are in business.
The Cosmic Cliffs, a cloudy area of star formation in the Carina constellation, was a favorite early piece of sky candy. She is looking at how jets from new stars, shock waves and ionizing radiation from more massive nearby stars that were born boiling hot are always changing the geography of the universe.
It's possible that this could be a template for what our own sun went through.
Between presentations, on the sidelines and in the hallways, senior astronomer who were on hand in 1989 when the idea of the telescope was first broached exchanged war stories about the telescope's development. The youngsters showed off data that blew past their own accomplishments.
The project scientist for operations for the telescope recalled her emotional tumult a year ago as she waited for the telescope's launch. The instrument was designed to unfold in space and Dr. Rigby had to count them all over and over.
She said that she was in denial. The deployment went well. She said she was living the dream.
Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who in 1989 chaired a key meeting at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said simply, "I'm just blew away."
He said that some of them weren't even born when planning for it. It's time to have at it.
The telescope has exceeded expectations thus far. Its resolving power is two times better than advertised. The telescope has enough maneuvering fuel to work for 26 years or more.
She and her colleagues rattled off the performance statistics of their instruments. The telescope's instruments are still being adjusted so the numbers may change. She told a group of astronomer in the lobby that they needed to change their results at the push of a button.
Events in the early millenniums of the universe are one of the biggest surprises so far. Galaxies seem to have formed faster than models thought.
Adam Riess dropped in for the day to ask how the universe got so old so quickly.
The goal of several international collaborations is to explore the province known as Cosmic Spring.
The efforts are based on the vision of the IR. As the universe expands, distant objects are speeding away from Earth so fast that their light has been stretched and turned invisible. The Hubble telescope can't see the most distant galaxies because they are invisible beyond a point.
The first galaxies began to bloom with stars when the universe was just one billion years old.
It takes time for matter to cool down and get dense enough to light up stars. She said that the rate of star formation peaked when the universe was four billion years old. The universe is now over 13 billion years old
Astronomers use redshift to measure the distance from a distant object to a nearby one. A redshift of 8 was considered a high one just a few months ago. The universe was only 327 million years old when the record redshift was created.
The team had aimed the telescope at a patch of sky called GOODS South, looking for galaxies that Hubble had missed. There were four ghosts in the heat of creation. It was confirmed that they were in the past.
A member of the University of California, Santa Cruz said they didn't want to say they believed it.
It is not expected to last long. A candidate galaxy that could have a redshift of 16 was reported by the collaboration.
Some experts are arguing about whether the overeager galaxies reveal something important in the current theories of the early universe. The growth of galaxies and black holes may have been sped up by some field or effect. The discrepancies may be due to scientific uncertainties about star formation.
Astronomers have been working on a model of a universe composed of dark energy, dark matter and a small amount of atomic matter for the last two decades. It is too soon to change that model, according to Dr. Curtis-Lake, who said that it would take at least three decades to observe it. She said that they're in early stages.
The closing talk was given by Dr. He gave a shout-out to Barbara Mikulski who supported the project when it was in danger of being canceled. The Habitable Worlds Observatory is a 12-meter space telescope that NASA will use to look for planets.
He said that everything they did has turned out to be worthwhile. We are here to celebrate and get a first look at what's out here. It is not the final thing we will do.
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