Scientists Show Us Their Favourite Space Photos

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been pinging back beautiful images of outer space for over 30 years now. Its sparkling galaxies adorn countless computer desktops, add a dose of realism to sci-fi TV shows and are plastered over the dorm walls of space-mad physics students all over the world.

Hubble can do much more than take a pretty picture. Since it left the Kennedy Space Centre on the back of the Discovery shuttle on the 24th April, 1990, Hubble has been orbiting Earth and making over a million observations, which in turn have formed the basis of over 15,000 scientific papers. It has peered an incredible 13 billion years into the past, shown us supermassive black holes, completed hundreds of thousands of orbits and continues to be crucial in helping us understand our place in the universe.

Its mission is soon drawing to a close. It will be phased out by the end of 2026, when it will be superseded by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The latter telescope is currently is getting ready for service in its target orbit – 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth. Its first images are expected to reach Earth this summer.

This seemed as good an opportunity as any to ask people who have seen thousands of Hubble images to select a few photos from the archives. Seven employees of the European Space Agency (ESA) have handpicked their favourites, and explained what makes them so special.

When I was a child, I used to cut up old Hubble calendars to fill the walls of my room with beautiful images of the cosmos. I now get to help bring these pictures to the public’s attention. The photo I’ve chosen features a kind of hidden gem. NGC 2525 is a galaxy 70 million light years away from Earth that forms part of a constellation called Puppis with a supermassive black hole at its centre.

If you look at the outer-left spiral in the photo you can see a bright, shining point. This is, in fact, a fading supernova, which Hubble managed to capture brilliantly. HST’s observations of NGC 2525 formed part of one of its major investigations, which was measuring the expansion rate of the universe. The mission helped us answer fundamental questions about the very nature of our universe. – Bethany Downer, ESA/Hubble chief science communications officer.

As someone who works in the art world as much as the science one, I’m really interested in noticing which astronomical images are picked up on by artists for inspiration. Artists around the world – from those who exhibit in prestigious Parisian galleries to people who work on the sidewalks of San Pedro – have sought inspiration in Hubble’s iconic image “Pillars of Creation”.

This picture reminds me almost every single day that nature is perhaps the greatest source of inspiration for artists. And that includes an occasionally forgotten aspect of nature: the night sky. – Mahdi Zamani, ESA/Hubble Image Editor and astronomical visualisation metadata specialist

I’ve gone for this photo because it highlights one of the things that has kept Hubble at the cutting edge of astronomy for 32 years now, which is that it operates in low Earth orbit [an altitude of less than 1,000 km from Earth; 545 km, in Hubble’s case]. The picture demonstrates how astronauts on various NASA spacecraft have been able to regularly service Hubble while it is in orbit, replacing the telescope’s instruments with newer, more capable versions. Some of those instruments, like the Wide Field Camera, are in their third generation now. – Calum Spring-Turner, ESA/Hubble science writer

​​I love these composite images of Uranus, firstly because they show a Uranus aurora [northern lights] that is moving as the planet rotates; and secondly because they highlight two lesser-known facts about Uranus – that it rotates on its side, and that it has its own ring system.

As someone who studies exoplanets [planets outside the solar system], one of the many things I find fascinating about our planets is that we can observe them in enough detail that we can actually pick up weather patterns and phenomena such as aurora happening in real time. Given how long most astronomical time scales are, that's incredibly exciting! – Eleanor Spring, ESA/Hubble science writer

What we see here is a detailed map of nearly an entire planetary system changing over time. These images show waves of dust being blown from the inner part of the planetary system to its outskirt. Why that is happening is a complete mystery.

These images were also taken with an instrument that has been on Hubble for over 20 years, yet they still provide us with nearly as much useful scientific information as we’d get with an incredibly up-to-date, state-of-the-art coronagraph used at the Very Large Telescope, in the Atacama Desert in Chile. – John Debes, ESA-AURA astronomer

This is one of the newest images we worked on after I joined the team, and it really stands out to me. For starters, it has many of the features which make astronomical images so unique: bright stars, wispy nebulas, lots of light, shadow and colour. 

This is the latest image we have of this particular jet of gas. Thanks to the combination of Hubble’s ability to capture incredible detail and the decades of hard work that have gone into the project, I can look back at older images and see how it has moved and changed. That’s a very rare thing. – Owen Higgins, ESA/Hubble outreach team intern

Voorwerps are rare astronomical scenarios where the central, active supermassive black hole has “turned off”, or become quiescent. That creates a quasar ionisation echo. 

I feel like these images give some of the best visualisations of the three-dimensional distributions of these ionised gas structures, not only illuminating their host galaxies but also the minds of students when describing the impact of active galaxies. To see the capabilities that such compact objects have on their hosts is always mind-boggling. – Travis Fischer, ESA-AURA astronomer