Rebooted Hubble Telescope Takes New Images of Unsuitable Galaxies

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Two strange galaxies were recently photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo: NASA, European Space Agency, STScI, Julian Dalcanton (UW), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

It looked grim there for a while, but Hubble is back in action after a computer glitch kept the space telescope offline for more than a month. With no time to waste, the 31-year-old observatory is already back in action, capturing live new images of eccentric galaxies.

Abominable billionaires blasting off into space make us nervous, so thank God for the Hubble Space Telescope. The storied observatory represents all that is good about our adventures in space; To date, the telescope has taken more than 1.5 million views of near and far objects, and its data has been cited in more than 18,000 scientific publications, according to NASA.

But recently, it looked as if Hubble’s historic era may be over, when a computer glitch shut down the show on June 13. The telescope has been out of service for over a month despite NASA efforts to get it back. I feared the worst and began to mentally prepare for an obituary. In hindsight, we can now say that reports of Hubble’s death were greatly exaggerated; NASA’s recovery team fixed the issue with the backup hardware, allowing science operations to resume on July 17 at 1:19 p.m. EDT.

It’s pretty good news, but needless to say, I was hardly the only one to get worried.

ARP-MADORE2115-273: A rare interacting galaxy pair Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Julianne Dalcanton (UW), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

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“I’ll admit I had some nervous moments during the Hubble shutdown, but I also had confidence in the wonderful NASA engineers and technicians,” Julian Dalcanton, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement. “Everyone is so grateful, we’re excited to get back to science!”

Dalcanton is an early recipient of Hubble’s revival, as her team uses the space telescope to collect images of exotic galaxies, including an interacting pair and a large spiral galaxy with an additional accessory.

The interacting pair is called ARP-MADORE2115-273, and it is located 297 million light-years away. The newly released parallax is the first high-resolution image of the Hubble system. Scientists thought ARP-MADORE2115-273 was a spinning galaxy caused by a collision, but the new image suggests that “the ongoing interaction between galaxies is much more complex, leaving behind a rich network of stars and dusty gases,” NASA explains.

Well, Hubble is back in business, and we instantly learn new things.

Large spiral galaxy ARP-MADORE0002-503. Photo: NASA, ESA, STScI, Julianne Dalcanton (UW), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Like the Milky Way, ARP-MADORE0002-503 is a spiral galaxy. Unlike the Milky Way, this galaxy has three spiral arms instead of the usual two. It is also much larger than our galaxy, with a radius of 163,000 light-years, making it three times larger than the Milky Way.

Other outstanding tasks on Hubble’s to-do list include observing globular clusters in distant galaxies and surveying the aurora borealis on Jupiter. After three decades of kind service, Hubble continues to serve as our watchful eye on the universe, and there is something very comforting about that.

MORE: A massive incoming comet appears as a “beautiful little dot of fog” in the new image.

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