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Making Extraordinary Science Ordinary

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A bright binary star surrounded by a colorful nebula on the black background of space. The star in the center is a large white spot surrounded by a circular glow. It has a large, X-shaped set of diffraction spikes around it. The nebula extends far above, below, left, and right of the star in long, arcing shapes made of thin, multicolored filaments — mostly red and greenish colors, but lit in a bright blue-green near the star where its light illuminates the gas.

The Hubble Space Telescope continued to guide discoveries with a “steady hand” and new pointing mode.

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Groundbreaking science has likely never felt more commonplace than during the remarkable, ongoing tenure of the Hubble Space Telescope. Continuing to make important discoveries from our solar system to the early universe, many of Hubble’s achievements in 2024 can be credited to its unique capabilities: high-sensitivity ultraviolet (UV) instruments, and a data archive spanning over 34 years that allows researchers to track change over time in the cosmos.

Unique Ultraviolet Observations

Scientists shared results of Hubble’s UV spectra of SN 2023ixf, a supernova in nearby galaxy Messier 101. The Hubble data, along with other observations across different wavelengths of light, captured early stages of an exploding star that are rarely seen and little understood, revealing that the explosive shock emerged from a thick, heated layer with a radius substantially larger than typical supergiant stars.

Looking ahead, Hubble’s ultraviolet capabilities will play a crucial role in the future of exoplanet science. In summer 2024, STScI announced the Rocky Worlds initiative. Hubble will work in tandem with the James Webb Space Telescope to search for planetary atmospheres in more than a dozen nearby low-mass, M-dwarf star systems.

The director’s discretionary initiative will use 250 Hubble orbits in which the short UV wavelengths will be crucial to understanding exoplanets’ clouds, aerosols, and atmospheric evolution, in addition to properties of their host stars. By the end of 2024, an external science advisory committee for the program was established, and a list of potential exoplanet targets had been compiled for the community’s consideration.

A rectangle of space with a black background scattered with gold-colored stars, some with four-point spikes. At the center, and taking up most of the image, is a nebula appearing as two translucent orbs attached by a white band. The orbs shine with blue, red, and orange cloud-like material, with some tendrils of fading colors floating away into space from the edges of both orbs, like loops of smoke. Where the two orbs are bonded, the red, blue, and orange colors are blocked by a thick semi-transparent white vertical structure.
Hubble celebrated its 34th anniversary with a detailed look at M76, the Little Dumbbell Nebula. Learn more about this striking object, a favorite of professional and amateur astronomers alike.
A montage of Hubble Space Telescope views of our solar system's four giant outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, each shown in enhanced color, taken from 2014 to 2024 under the OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) program. This long baseline allows astronomers to track seasonal changes in each planet's turbulent atmosphere, with the sharpness of the NASA planetary flyby probes of the 1980s. From upper-left toward center: The hazy white polar cap on the three blue-green-colored Uranus images appears more face-on as the planet approaches northern summer. Center-right to far center-right: Three images of the blue planet Neptune show the coming and going of clouds as the Sun's radiation level changes. Several of Neptune's mysterious dark spots have come and gone sequentially over OPAL's decade of observations. Seven views of yellow-brown Saturn stretch across the mosaic in a triangle, showing the tilt of the ring plane relative to the view from Earth, progressing from left to right, shown from an oblique angle to nearly edge-on, with colorful changes to bands of clouds in the turbulent atmosphere. Bottom center: Three images of Jupiter spanning nearly a decade, form a triangle. Notable changes are seen in Jupiter's colorful white- and brown-striped cloud structure. The Great Red Spot, seen at southern latitudes, is prominent in each photo.
Hubble’s OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) program celebrated 10 years in 2024. The dedicated time devoted to this program has led to an improved understanding of our cosmic backyard and has contributed to the field of planetary science overall.

OPAL Marks a Decade of Tracking the Outer Planets

Closer to home, Hubble celebrated a decade of observing the outer planets in our solar system with the OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) program. This long-term program has allowed scientists to observe change over time in our cosmic backyard and is improving the field of planetary science. Hubble is the only telescope that can provide high resolution and image stability for global studies of cloud coloration, activity, and atmospheric motion on a consistent long-term basis to help researchers constrain the underlying mechanics of weather and climate systems.

New Pointing Mode

With the goal of continuing the Hubble Space Telescope’s outstanding service to scientific discovery, the Hubble teams at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and STScI transitioned to using a single gyroscope (gyro) in June. This was necessary due to increasingly poor performance of one of the three gyros that previously guided Hubble’s target acquisitions. While this has a limited impact to the efficiency of scheduling observations, it does not change the quality of the telescope’s images or spectra. This ensures that Hubble can continue its unparalleled scientific productivity into the next decade.

The Andromeda galaxy, a spiral galaxy, spreads across the image. It is tilted nearly edge-on to our line of sight so that it appears very oval. The borders of the galaxy are jagged because the image is a mosaic of smaller, square images against a black background. The outer edges of the galaxy are blue, while the inner two-thirds is yellowish with a bright, central core. Dark, dusty filamentary clouds wrap around the outer half of the galaxy's disk. At 10 o'clock, a smaller dwarf elliptical galaxy forms a fuzzy, yellow blob. Hubble's sharp vision distinguishes about 200 million stars within the image.
This panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy is the largest Hubble photomosaic ever assembled. This vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy required over 600 Hubble snapshots taken over 10 years. The mosaic image captures the glow of 200 million stars — only a fraction of Andromeda's stellar population.

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