Telescopes: The Starting dot of astronomical discoveries
The universe is one of the most astonishing things and well, who doesn’t love it? Way back in our childhood days, most of us were curious to learn about the secrets of the universe. We were keen to know about the beautiful moon that we see every night, the shining stars, and the giant planets we have surrounded by, but our universe is not just that, is it? It includes all the energy, matter, space, black holes, suns, and the list keeps piling on. Ever wondered what was the starting point to all these discoveries? Let’s find them out here.
The History of Astronomy and Lenses
In the early medieval, astronomers used to figure out everything with their naked eyes, which limited the things it left us to explore. But then, many new inventions made lenses and glasses that further lead to the discovery of many fascinating and astounding things they weren’t able to discover before. And telescopes were the instrument that helped in the significant discoveries. Earlier few lens makers used to apply for the patent for the discovery of telescopes. But Galileo Galilei was the first astronomer to point his self-made telescope up towards the sky. And here the journey began, and it was a revolution in astronomy.
Telescopes have revolutionized the understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. It helped to unveil the secrets of the cosmos, the dawn of time, and the birth of the universe.
Discovery of Telescopes
In 1609, Galileo Galilei made his first telescope which had a magnification of 3 times. He made the telescope with the help of a tube that had a convex lens on one end and a concave eyepiece on the other end. Galileo was the first astronomer to point the telescope towards the sky and observe the beauty of the sky. In the beginning, he could see the fuzzy images. Later on, he worked on increasing the magnification of his telescopes and further increased it to 8 times and managed it to 23 times the initial magnification, which began a new era in astronomy and led to various discoveries.
Galileo pointed his telescopes towards the beautiful and undiscovered sky. Galileo discovered many astronomical things. He saw the craters, valleys, and mountains on the surface of the moon for the first time. He also discovered the moons of Jupiter and further found that our milky way galaxy comprises stars, not with gases, and he discovered one of the most surprising things that Saturn has rings. He thus started the revolution in astronomy with his two pieces of glass.
Earlier, according to the Churches, the earth was the center of the universe, and all other celestial bodies rotated around us. But Galileo found that the moons of Jupiter were not revolving around the earth. They were revolving around Jupiter. Thus Galileo stated the Sun is the center of our system and every planet revolves around it with their satellites revolving around their planets. Even after conflicts in the ideas with the church, Galileo worked hard on finding more amazing events happening in the night sky.
Later Kepler and Newton worked in this field and made more developed telescopes. Astronomers before them used long telescopes to study the universe. Newton made his reflecting telescope and stated that white light splits into seven different colors, after which many scientists and astronomers worked on telescopes and changed their predecessors. Then came William Herschel, who got intrigued to study the distant celestial bodies. He made his very own sets of powerful telescopes, and he became successful in them as he made his eyepieces with 6450 times magnification and eventually became the one who discovered the planet Uranus. He discovered the stars are the ones that compose the nebulae.
Purpose and importance of Telescopes
The purpose of a telescope is to make things easier to see, to make the invisible visible, and to make things already visible, visible more clearly. Telescopes are the instruments that help astronomers to see distant objects. It works on the principle of gathering or collecting lights and then focuses on a point to get a sharp image. Mirrors and lenses help astronomers to study the deep facts of the universe. They used mirrors in telescopes, not lenses. The reason we use mirrors in telescopes is that they are lighter, and are easier to make them smooth as compared to lenses, as the size of the mirror increases the amount of light it gathers also increases. Also, mirrors are thin, one-sided, and are easier to polish. Also, they are not that heavy and that makes them easier to launch into space. The telescopes are very important for astronomers. They can observe things that human eyes can’t. They have taken billions of images that help study the age of the universe. Telescopes made space exploration and travel easier. They confirmed that black holes are present in the center of almost every galaxy. They can capture accurate pictures.
Hubble Space Telescope — The window of the universe
Hubble Space Telescope is one of the largest space telescopes on earth and named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble. It is a versatile and powerful space telescope that was launched in 1990, hoping that it will help us discover unknown mysteries and phenomena of our universe. Earlier people used to discover about the expansion of the universe using a ground-based telescope and the Hubble telescope solved this problem. It had a speed of about 5 miles per second and it was difficult to get a steady image. To solve this problem, they fixed 6 Gyroscopes into the telescope which helped in keeping the telescope stable.
After the successful launch of Hubble, the astronomers were waiting for the first image that Hubble took and it was fuzzy. It was all because the scientists made a mistake getting a wrongly shaped mirror and weren’t focusing on the right part. Hubble was the only telescope that was maintained in space by astronauts. So, the astronauts had to travel and correct that problem with the help of glasses which were like a machine called Costar. The problem got figured and Hubble did its job perfectly ever since. NASA has performed a sum of 5 servicing missions. So Hubble started its mission of finding how our universe was born and how it is growing.
What made Hubble so precise
Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has amazed the world with the sensational images of our universe it could pick. The 2.4-meter mirror is helping the world to see stunning images. But why is the Hubble better than ground-based telescopes and how is it able to gather so much data? Well, you’ll be thrilled to know that Hubble is actually above our atmosphere. Yes, the atmosphere affects the ground-based telescopes, and that’s why they weren’t able to take precise images. The Ozone layer blocks the ultraviolet light and airflow in the upper atmosphere, which leads to difficulties in getting a precise image of any distant object. And because of its presence above the atmosphere, Hubble can take some of the deepest and sharpest images of the universe.
Discoveries by the Hubble Space Telescope
Since its launch, Hubble has made an astounding 1.3 million observations to date. The telescope’s sensitive cameras and spectrographs can view objects as nearby and small as colliding asteroids to distant star-forming galaxies that date back to the time when the universe was only three percent of its current age. Hubble has helped in finding the age of the universe and calculation approximated to 13.8 billion years. It also helped in determining the rate of expansion of the universe. Hubble is the one which discovered that nearly every major galaxy has a black hole at its center. It helped in getting the image of a black hole. Hubble surprised everyone as it discovered objects that were from the age when the universe was only 3 percent of its present age.
Some of the major discoveries of Hubble-Telescope:
- It proved the existence of supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies.
- It found Eagle Nebula.
- Helped in the discovery of many exoplanets in our Universe.
- Discovered many moons of Pluto.
- Helped in Designing a 3D map that shows the distribution of dark matter across the universe.
- Hubble discovered that water vapors were exploding from the surface of Jupiter’s moon “Europa”.
With the help of Hubble, astronomers found that the mass of our milky way galaxy is 1.5 trillion solar units and it has a radius of 129000 light-years. In 2015, Hubble took an image of the supernova, Refsdal which was the first-ever reappearance of a supernova.
As we saw throughout this article, we can understand the significance of telescopes in our everyday life and how it has driven the astronomy filed towards a much more wide range of discoveries that one couldn’t have possibly imagined. Hope this article was able to fascinate you and help you learn a lot.
