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The Hubble Space Telescope (HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope , but it is one of the largest and most versatile, renowned as a vital research tool and as a public relations boon for astronomy .
The Hubble length or Hubble distance is a unit of distance in cosmology, defined as cH −1 — the speed of light multiplied by the Hubble time. It is equivalent to 4,420 million parsecs or 14.4 billion light years. (The numerical value of the Hubble length in light years is, by definition, equal to that of the Hubble time in years.)
The Hubble length / is 14.4 billion light years in the standard cosmological model, equivalent to times Hubble time. The Hubble time is the reciprocal of the Hubble constant, [5] and is slightly larger than the age of the universe (13.8 billion years) as it is the age the universe would have had if expansion was linear.
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Around 800 classical Cepheids are known in the Milky Way galaxy, out of an expected total of over 6,000. Several thousand more are known in the Magellanic Clouds, with more discovered in other galaxies; [9] the Hubble Space Telescope has identified some in NGC 4603, which is 100 million light years distant. [10]
The universe's expansion rate, a figure called the Hubble constant, is measured in kilometers per second per megaparsec, a distance equal to 3.26 million light-years.
For orbital telescopes, the background sky brightness is set by the zodiacal light. The Hubble telescope can detect objects as faint as a magnitude of +31.5, [24] and the James Webb Space Telescope (operating in the infrared spectrum) is expected to exceed that.
The Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) is a scientific instrument for infrared astronomy, installed on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), operating from 1997 to 1999, and from 2002 to 2008. Images produced by NICMOS contain data from the near-infrared part of the light spectrum.