(NASA/ESA/Hubble et al. via SWNS)
By Dean Murray
A jaw-dropping gallery of cosmic wonders marks the Hubble Space Telescope's 36th anniversary.
The selection includes an incredible image of a "sea slug-shaped" cosmic wonder called the Trifid Nebula, released this week by NASA to mark the spacecraft's anniversary in Earth's orbit.
(NASA/ESA/Hubble et al. via SWNS)
Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-31), and was deployed into Earth orbit the following day.
The school-bus-sized telescope has since made nearly 1.7 million observations, targeting about 55,000 astronomical objects.
(NASA/ESA/Hubble et al. via SWNS)
Its discoveries have resulted in over 22,000 scientific papers and more than 1.3 million citations, making it one of the most influential scientific instruments ever built.
Its achievements include precisely measuring the universe’s expansion rate and contributing to the discovery of dark energy – a finding that led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
(NASA/ESA/Hubble et al. via SWNS)