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(Mikulski) Over here is the picture taken after the servicing mission and this is what the
new 1994 Wide Field Planetary picture will show us. The pictures are remarkable.
The science that will come from the pictures are of historical significance.
(Postman) Just from seeing that one picture, you knew that this was going to be a
revolutionary telescope.
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(Heckman) Using Hubble to study the evolution of galaxies, we
exploit the fact that telescope in astronomy acts like a time machine. When
we look at the most distant objects in the universe with Hubble, we're actually
looking far back into time. The light has taken something like 10 to 12 billion
years to reach us when we look at the most distant galaxies.
(Postman) Hubble's ability to provide very crisp images, far crisper and cleaner and clearer than any
other telescope, allows you to see what these things look like. They're not just
fuzzy blobs of light.
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(Ferguson) What we're trying to do is piece together the history of galaxy evolution,
from the very very earliest galaxies that we can see, which we now we're
getting within about a billion years of the Big Bang all the way to to the present.
(Postman) The other thing that Hubble allowed us to do is get very precise
measurements of the colors of these galaxies and those colors tell us about
the kind of stars that are in the galaxies and how old those stars are.
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(Ferguson) There there - is sort of two different ways of thinking about a redshift:
There's the Doppler effect.
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So objects that are moving toward you if that were happening in light the light
would be shifted to the blue, if it's moving away from you it would be shifted to the
red. In cosmology, there's another aspect, the whole universe is expanding and
that's essentially stretching the light on its way from from the distant object
to us, and that really allows you to determine where in the universe the
objects you're seeing are because you're measuring essentially that stretching factor.
(Heckman) It's not like we're gonna invent a better toothpaste or solve the energy
crisis, we're doing things that are at the sort of frontiers of knowledge.
(Postman) One of the great things about being able to study this history of galaxies is it not
only tells us about what the cosmic history of formation of stars and
galaxies is, but it also can tell us stuff about our own galaxy's past and
its potential future as well.
(Heckman) I think people just have a powerful urge to understand their origins.
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(Ferguson) How did we get here?
You know. What was the, what was before the Earth? What was before the Sun?
Those kinds of simple questions that are startlingly hard to answer and the
amazing thing is that we can start to answer many of them.
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