Hubble Space Telescope Quotes

I've been going insane reading my students' papers. Apparently several of them think the Hubble Space Telescope is used to search the universe for hubbles." ~ Ithana Aaronson

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted aurora near the poles of both Saturn and Jupiter. And on Earth, the aurora borealis and australis (the northern and southern lights) serve as intermittent reminders of how nice it is to have a protective atmosphere.

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years.

One of the most beautiful photographs of a galactic black hole is the one taken by the Hubble space telescope of the galaxy NGC 4261.

Hubble died of a heart attack in 1953. One last small oddity awaited him. For reasons cloaked in mystery, his wife declined to have a funeral and never revealed what she did with his body. Half a century later the whereabouts of the century’s greatest astronomer remain unknown. For a memorial you must look to the sky and the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 and named in his honor.

Hubble was lucky in a way. The Hubble Space Telescope could easily have been given another name had certain events turned out differently: if someone had not prematurely died (Keeler), if someone else had not taken a promotion (Curtis), or if another (Shapley) was not mulishly wedded to a flawed vision of the cosmos. The discovery of the modern universe is a story filled with trials, errors, serendipitous breaks, battles of wills, missed opportunities, herculean measurements, and brilliant insights. In other words, it is science writ large.

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book. Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something on the order of two hundred exabytes of information, roughly equal to “the entire digital content of today’s world,” according to Nature Neuroscience.*1 If that is not the most extraordinary thing in the universe, then we certainly have some wonders yet to find.

Historically, discoveries of pure science are slow to reach the mainstream compared with those of the applied sciences, which noisily announce themselves with new medicines and gadgets. The Hubble has proved an exception, remaking, in a single generation, the popular conception of the universe. It has accomplished this primarily through the aesthetic force of its discoveries, which distill the difficult abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats’s famous couplet: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Though philosophy has hardly registered it, the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is. The telescope compels the mind to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite.

Discovery first flew in 1984, the third orbiter to join the fleet. It was named for one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook. Space shuttle Discovery is the most-flown orbiter; today will be its thirty-ninth and final launch. By the end of this mission, it will have flown a total of 365 days in space, making it the most well traveled spacecraft in history. Discovery was the first orbiter to carry a Russian cosmonaut and the first to visit the Russian space station Mir. On that flight, in 1995, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot an American spacecraft. Discovery flew twelve of the thirty-eight missions to assemble the International Space Station, and it was responsible for deploying the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. This was perhaps the most far reaching accomplishment of the shuttle program, as Hubble has been called the most important telescope in history and one of the most significant scientific instruments ever invented. It has allowed astronomers to determine the age of the universe, postulate how galaxies form, and confirm the existence of dark energy, among many other discoveries. Astronomers and astrophysicists, when they are asked about the significance of Hubble, will simply say that it has rewritten the astronomy books. In the retirement process, Discovery will be the “vehicle of record,” being kept as intact as possible for future study. Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter after the loss of Challenger and then again after the loss of Columbia. To me, this gives it a certain feeling of bravery and hope. ‘Don’t worry,’ Discovery seemed to tell us by gamely rolling her snow-white self out to the launchpad. 'Don’t worry, we can still dream of space. We can still leave the earth.’ And then she did.

To me, it is far nobler to create my own meaning derived from that around me, using my critical faculties, than to accept unquestioningly the meaning that a superdeity has enforced upon me. The same with beauty and the universe around us. There is something worth dwelling on in that notion that we don’t need for a god to cause and define that universe—that beauty, that spectacle—when we are appreciating it. Whether it be an incredibly complex yet symmetrical mathematical equation, a butterfly’s wings or the expansive Hubble space telescope pictures of nebulae and clouds of space dust and gases, there is much to marvel at in the universe. It’s even more marvelous that there is no painter at nature’s easel.

Knowing that R. L.’s death at nineteen is not his end, Mrs. O’Brien and Jack can trust the nuns. Those who live in the way of grace may die young. They may die horribly. But they never come to a bad end because death is not the end. We are quite a ways beyond Heidegger here. Whatever other influence he had on Malick’s vision, Malick doesn’t accept that death is the limit, that time has a final horizon beyond which the rest is silence. Beyond death there is reconciliation, reunion, hope. Beyond death, there are sunflowers. The sunflower is a perfect image for the way of grace. Its name is suggestive of heavenly glory. In color and shape, it is a reflex of the burning suns of what might be an infinite universe. Malick uses Hubble Telescope pictures of deep space, but one doesn’t have to have a telescope to see the glory shine. Suns grow in the backyard, if we our eyes are open windows. Sunflowers follow the sun through the day, the perfect botanical expression of the way of grace that receives the glory. It’s the perfect Heideggerian flower that never forgets Being. But Malick does something stunning with his sunflowers. The first shot of is a close-up of a single flower, as Mrs. O’Brien speaks of the way of grace. We can see others dancing in the wind behind, but we concentrate on this one. At the end of the film, the camera pulls back, a brilliant blue sky fills the top two-thirds of the screen, and we see a breathtaking field of sunflowers. Through the suffering and loss that the movie depicts, the single sunflower of grace blossoms into a field of sunflowers. It’s Job, surrounded by his second family that he can love. It’s Brothers Karamazov. It’s the Agnus Dei and all seeds that go into the earth to die, so they can produce fruit.

For billions and billions of years, while the planet Earth was spinning through space, the process of evolution took place. There were minerals, then plants, then animals, all formed from atoms created in the stars. The planet had been floating in space for 4.5 billion years before modern humans showed up. It is worth noting that before humans showed up, life on Earth for the other species stayed pretty much the same. Food, shelter, and survival were the name of the game. Things haven’t really changed that much for them. The monkeys lived in trees for tens of millions of years, just as they do now. The fish swam in the waters for hundreds of millions of years, just as they do now. Everything on Earth stayed pretty much the same until you humans showed up with your human mind. You discovered electricity and made the nighttime bright. You built giant skyscrapers and machinery that never existed before. You even dug into the earth, extracted minerals, and developed advanced materials like silicon chips. Then you built a rocket ship, got in, and flew to the moon. Compare that to what any other animals have done. They are living exactly the same as they did a thousand years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, a million years ago. You’re not. You used to live in caves; now you’re planning to live on Mars. What did that? Did God hide a rocket ship, and you found it somewhere? No, your mind did that. Your mind figured out everything was made of atoms, then you figured out how to split the atom. The human mind actually figured out how the universe was made, all the way down to the quantum level. Your mind put up the Hubble Space Telescope that can see back to the beginning of creation. The Hubble can pick up light that has been traveling through space for more than thirteen billion years. This allows us to see what was happening thirteen billion years ago. Can you even think about that? The fact is you can because you have a human mind.

Our main problem over the past few days and weeks,’ he said, ‘has lain in trying to connect the various phenomena. In fact, there wasn’t any obvious connection until a jelly-like substance started to crop up. Sometimes it appeared in small quantities, sometimes in larger amounts, but always with the distinguishing characteristic that it disintegrated rapidly on contact with air. Unfortunately the discovery of the jelly only added to the mystery, given its presence in crustaceans, mussels and whales - three types of organism that could hardly be more different. Of course, it might have been some kind of fungus, a jellified version of rabies, an infectious disease like BSE or swine fever. But, if so, why would ships be disappearing or crabs transporting killer algae? There was no sign of the jelly on the worms that infested the slope. They were carrying a different kind of cargo - bacteria that break down hydrates and cause methane gas to rise. Hence the landslide and the tsunami. And what about the mutated species that have been emerging all over the world? Even fish have been behaving oddly. None of it adds up. In that respect, Jack Vanderbilt was right to discern an intelligent mind behind the chaos. But he overestimated our ability - no scientist knows anything like enough about marine ecology to be capable of manipulating it to that extent. People are fond of saying that we know more about space than we do about the oceans. It’s perfectly true, but there’s a simple reason why: we can’t see or move as well in the water as we can in outer space. The Hubble telescope peers effortlessly into different galaxies, but the world’s strongest floodlight only illuminates a dozen square metres of seabed. An astronaut in a spacesuit can move with almost total freedom, but even the most sophisticated divesuit won’t stop you being crushed to death beyond a certain depth. AUVs and ROVs are only operational if the conditions are right. We don’t have the physical constitution or the technology to deposit billions of worms on underwater hydrates, let alone the requisite knowledge to engineer them for a habitat that we barely understand. Besides, there are all the other phenomena: deep-sea cables being destroyed at the bottom of the ocean by forces other than the underwater slide; plagues of jellyfish and mussels rising from the abyssal plains. The simplest explanation would be to see these developments as part of a plan, but such a plan could only be the work of a species that knows the ocean as intimately as we do the land - a species that lives in the depths and plays the dominant role in that particular universe.

The human brain produces in 30 seconds as much data as the NASA Hubble Space telescope has produced in its lifetime

The stuff of life, in other words, arose in places and times somewhat more accessible to our telescopic investigations. Since most of us spend our lives confined to a narrow strip near Earth’s surface, we tend to think of the cosmos as a lofty, empyrean realm far beyond our reach and relevance. We forget that only a thin sliver of atmosphere separates us from the rest of the universe. But science continues to show just how intimately connected life on Earth is to extraterrestrial processes. In particular, several recent findings have further illuminated the cosmic origins of life’s key ingredients. Take the element phosphorus, for example. It is a critical constituent of DNA, as well as of our cells, teeth and bones. Astronomers have long struggled to trace its buildup through cosmic history, because the imprint of phosphorus is difficult to discern in old, cool stars in the outskirts of our galaxy. (Some of these stellar “time capsules” contain the ashes of their forebears, the very first generation of stars that formed near the dawn of time.) But in a paper published in December in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team reported that it had measured the abundance of phosphorus in 13 such stars, using data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. Their findings highlight the dominant role of so-called hypernovae, explosions even more energetic than supernovae that spell the demise of massive stars, in making the elements

Time on Hubble is a precious commodity. Astronomers across the world regularly ask for much more time than is available. Keeping Hubble working 24/7 is no small task. Not a single second must be lost and all tasks — either observations or so-called ‘housekeeping’ tasks, such as repositioning of the telescope, or uploading new observing schedules — are meticulously planned.

Is there competition between different observatories? A large and ambitious astronomical research project today would use large amounts of time on a whole range of different telescopes on the ground and in space. These telescopes, far from competing with one another, provide different and complementary views of astronomical sources that greatly increase our ability to understand the physical processes that create them. It is usually a case of "the whole being greater than the sum of the parts". Hubble plays an absolutely pivotal role in many of these programmes.

papers. Apparently several of them think the Hubble Space Telescope is used to search the universe for hubbles.

Ten years ago, I read that there were two galaxies for everyone alive. Lately, since we loosed the Hubble space telescope, we have revised our figures. There are maybe nine galaxies for each of us—eighty billion galaxies. Each galaxy harbors at least one hundred billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are four hundred billion suns—give or take 50 percent—or sixty-nine suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, said an early report, that the stars are “not 12 but 13 billion years old.” Two galaxies, nine galaxies … one hundred billion suns, four hundred billion suns … twelve billion years, thirteen billion years …

The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined. —John N. Bahcall, 1990

Apparently several of them think the Hubble Space Telescope is used to search the universe for hubbles.

With the eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope we have seen that the House of God is the House of Chaos!