The nineties were a simpler time. Politics were weird in a way you could mostly laugh at before getting an abortion on demand in Texas. As children, a major corporation regularly bribed us to read with tiny pizzas (which may explain a few things about my personality today). And people knew if they were on team NSYNC or Backstreet.
(Backstreet, obviously).
And when the good folks at NASA had the wild idea to point a telescope at absofuckinglutely nothing for its Christmas vacation, people rolled their eyes at what the broken space tax heap would do this time. Until…
Today’s Moment of Science… the Hubble Deep Field
Humans have been around for about 200,000 years. It took, give or take, 195,000 of those to sort out some written languages. 2,500 years ago, Democritus proposed that the bright region of space from the Milky Way was illuminated by distant stars. About a thousand years ago, Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sūfī described a “small cloud,” unknowingly making the first observation of a galaxy outside of our own, Andromeda (and my favorite accidental joke in astronomy). It was only about 500 years ago when Copernicus offered a tiny suggestion that we weren’t the center of the universe. Which took a bit of convincing for some drag queens in Rome, but the math was mathing.
With this new understanding of our place in existence, the Copernican Revolution ushered in a wave of discoveries. New observations were made about Andromeda and the nature of our own galaxy. Charles Messier, a frustrated comet-hunting French astronomer, documented every bit of non-comet fuckery that got in his way. By the final publication of his work in 1781, he’d cataloged 103 of these “Messier objects.” seven were added from his notes by other astronomers. Forty would later be identified as galaxies.
None of the Messier objects were confirmed to be other galaxies for well over another century. Even Andromeda, our visible neighbor, was thought to be a spiral nebula of sorts within our galaxy until the 1920s. Methods that Henrietta Leavitt pulled out of the night sky for measuring the distance to variable stars were used by Edwin Hubble to sort out the distance to Andromeda and Triangulum. On January 1st, 1925, he presented his findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Those “nebula” were too far away to be in our galaxy.
As of 1925, the Milky Way was one of three galaxies.
By the 1960s, a list of over 30,000 galaxies had been cataloged.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low Earth orbit around in the 1990s, by which time we knew about idk at least four more galaxies. Still, the average person’s understanding of what was out there just beyond the dark was far removed from where we are today. The big bang wasn’t a show yet, and it wasn’t a thoroughly hammered out theory either. Pluto was still a planet. Al Gore was still a senator, and when Hubble was having some technical issues, he wanted a really big pillow to smother the expensive space blunder in its infancy.
Besides, how much space bullshit could possibly have been hiding out there in all that nothing?
As long as Al Gore doesn’t get his way, we’ll have a look tomorrow.
This has been part one of a two part MOS, just waiting to see how many people comment that they love JWST before reading the article.
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Less than a century ago, the Milky Way defined the borders of existence. In 1925, those walls were smashed down as we found that we were one of, well, at least three galaxies. The universe began to take shape as millions of galaxies were identified over the next half-century. Superclusters of galaxies and voids filled with an unimaginable amount of nothing mapped their way through creation.
If astronomers wanted to explore much further though, there was one itsy bitsy little complication to overcome: our pale blue dot itself.
Today’s Moment of Science… The Hubble Deep Field, Part 2.
Even today, the most technologically advanced equipment on the planet’s surface would still suffer some distortion from Earth’s atmosphere. Astronomers had to imagine new ways of peering into the stars. German scientist Hermann Oberth was likely the first to suggest telescopes in space in 1923, but didn’t get too far into details. That and he was- technical term- a Nazi piece of shit until the day he fucking died.
The 1946 paper “Astronomical Advantages of an Extra-terrestrial Observatory” from theoretical physicist Lyman Spitzer fleshed out the idea of a telescope in space. He had plenty of ideas for what to do with this theoretical flying telescope aided by spectroscopy equipment. However, he admitted that “practical uses of this instrument would not be immediate; this would be an instrument which might be expected to increase very basically our understanding of what goes on in the stars and in the spaces between them.”
“…the spaces between them.” Spitzer, you prophetic sonofabitch.
The Soviets were still over a decade away from catapulting their techno jingle ball into orbit. Meanwhile, Spitzer is lugging around balls the size of Rhode Island, suggesting space observatories to get a better view of the universe. You know, just to see what’s happening out there in all the… nothing.
That said, the USSR beat NASA to the punch by nine months with Proton-1, launched for a three month mission in 1965. The gamma ray telescope studied high energy cosmic rays– which, swear to Sagan’s ghost, only sounds like sci-fi. It was followed by Proton-2, 3, and 4. Around the same time, Spitzer was head of a committee sorting out a list of objectives for a maybe-eventual-someday big ass telescope.
Nancy Grace Roman, astronomer and NASA executive affectionately called the ‘mother of Hubble,’ oversaw several of their early space telescopes. Though some people would have pushed for a project like Hubble earlier, she viewed its predecessors as a way to progress over the technical mountains they’d need to climb for the eventual massive undertaking.
NASA’s first space telescope, the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO-1) was an ambitious instrument with equipment to detect gamma rays, x-rays, and UV rays. Launched in 1966, it endured three days of not being a total fuck-up before a power failure ended the mission.
Two years later, OAO-2 was launched with a focus on UV imaging. A previously obscured view of the universe started to become apparent. These weren’t the blurry yet lovely images of distant galaxies we’ve become accustomed to with new space gizmos. These were measurements of UV output, taken pixel by pixel. Over 5,000 stars emitting UV light, otherwise invisible to us, were newly revealed.
There have been about a hundred space telescopes now with various degrees of success, capabilities, goals, and impact on our understanding of space. The IUE gave us our first good look at a supernova. The Spitzer Space Telescope (named for Lyman Spitzer) was instrumental in discovering the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system. And Planck, uh, certainly has suggestions about dark matter that I think are adorable.
Hubble was different.
Originally deemed the “Large Space Telescope,” or LST, Roman brought on astrophysicist Charles Robert O’Dell to be the lead scientist on the project in 1972. But just when it seemed like a plan was in place, politics happened. Congress delivered a familiar refrain of “fuck you and your funding” in 1974. A lot of scientists got angry and sent letters to their representatives, something that used to goddamn work apparently. It wasn’t the last time funding for the project would cause a bit of a ruckus, but collaborating with the European Space Agency kept things going. The telescope’s mirror had to be downsized due to budget cuts, but with a mirror measuring 2.4 meters instead of the initially planned 3 meters, it’s still- scientific term- big.
Renamed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1983, multiple delays pushed its eventual launch to April 24, 1990. To say that the first images sent back from low Earth orbit were disappointing would be an understatement. The device used to test Hubble’s mirror had been incorrectly assembled, with one lens out of place by a mere 1.3mm. This affected some of Hubble’s capabilities more than others, but the general effect was blurry, out of focus images from this billion dollar floater.
Before repairs, it had some functionality. In 1992, a nearly forgotten Medium-Deep Survey was taken. The red blobs were almost definitely distant galaxies. Fortunately, the Space Shuttle mission to repair the mirror in December of 1993 was successful. Hubble’s first brilliant images in full focus arrived in 1994.
Robert Williams was in charge of all things Hubble by this point, and got the wild hair up his ass idea to use a now-functional telescope to look at fuckall for a spell. The idea was not well received by colleagues, and Williams knew he wouldn’t have gotten approval if he needed it, but he didn’t need it. “As director, I had 10 percent of the telescope time, and I could do what I wanted.” The astronomer knew it could have been a colossal failure, viewed as another waste of money at NASA. He said he would have resigned.
Hubble shot 342 images of a speck measuring one 24-millionth the size of the night sky (anything to avoid the metric system). After the images were processed and combined, a final composite was released to the public on January 15th, 1996.
From a great blank nothing came a view of over 3,000 distant, ancient galaxies. The Hubble Deep Field gave us a look at galaxies as far away as 12 billion light years, and changed our understanding of the night sky forever. I still cry sometimes when I look at it.
Lyman Spitzer is still credited with dreaming up the space telescope. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, or simply Roman, is scheduled to take an infrared view of the universe in 2027. Robert Williams called the results of his project “a neat image.”
This has been your Moment of Science, just throwing it out there that Hubble took decades from conception to the Deep Field, so it feels par for the course that this article took a week.
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