The Hubble Space Telescope turns 32!

Hickson Compact Group 40

On April 24, 2022, the Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 32nd birthday. To commemorate the celebration of the most famed telescope man has ever seen, the team behind the telescope released an image of Hickson Compact Group 40, the shot containing 5 whole galaxies, taken by Hubble late last year. Nearly all of the galaxies have sources of radio waves at their cores, potential evidence that a huge black hole resides at each galaxy’s center. Nasa has said that the galaxies are gravitational impacting one another, with the galaxies so clustered together that they could fit within a span of space only twice as far across as our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. On Hubble’s special day, the scientists at NASA were quick to point out that this beautiful shot was only one of 1.5 million snapshots taken by the telescope, each of which is stored at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. It is safe to say that Hubble, for 32 years now, has been a national and public treasure.