Stunning new image of ‘Cosmic Reef’ released for Hubble’s 30th birthday

An image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope of a young, glittering collection of stars resembling an aerial burst.

The Hubble Space Telescope has shown off a mesmerising new image from deep in space to mark its 30th anniversary.

It reveals a vast star-forming region close to the Milky Way, located some 163,000 light-years away.

The image – showing giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbour NGC 2020 – has been nicknamed the ‘Cosmic Reef’ because it looks like an undersea world.

Hubble was sent into low Earth orbit on April 24, 1990 to capture images and data of distant galaxies, planets and supermassive black holes deep within our universe. It has yielded some 1.4 million observations and provided data for more than 17,000 scientific papers, according to the European Space Agency (ESA) which operates the telescope with Nasa.

However, the instrument has not been without its problems, suffering from the offset with blurred vision due to a flawed mirror.

The tiny error meant early images had none of the sharp detail the $1.5 billion telescope had been designed for, and though it was still able to do some work in the early years, the issue was not corrected until a shuttle mission in 1993.

This involved seven astronauts spending months training for five risky and complex spacewalks, before a mission aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in December 1993 to install “glasses” – the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, or COSTAR – as well as replace several instruments.

Their rescue mission was a success, and the Hubble Space Telescope became a triumph not only for Nasa, but for the entire astronomical world, with images from the cosmos unlike anything seen before.

Some have called Hubble the most important scientific tool ever built, and even after 30 years, and with plans for the launch of more advanced space telescopes, it shows no sign of retiring anytime soon.

The US space agency says operations will be funded for as long as they remain productive.

Last year, its data resulted in almost 1,000 scientific papers being published – so it continues to stand at the forefront of discovery.

“The Hubble Space Telescope has shaped the imagination of truly a whole generation, inspiring not only scientists, but almost everybody,” said Professor Gunther Hasinger, ESA director of science.
It is paramount for the excellent and long-lasting cooperation between Nasa and ESA.”

Each year, Hubble takes a new photo to share with the world to celebrate its birthday.

The milestone image for 2020 shows two star-forming regions dominated by the glow of stars at least ten times more massive than our sun, although they live only a few million years, compared to the ten-billion-year lifetime of our sun.

Narrowing the age of the universe down to about 13.8 billion years is one of Hubble’s many achievements, as well as finding that the universe is not just expanding, but accelerating, a discovery which won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

For the public it is the images it has captured that will always be remembered.

Among the most famous is the Pillars of Creation, three towering spires of molecular gas at the heart of the Eagle Nebula which captured detail of the places where stars are born unlike anything else seen at the time.

Less striking, but far more important, is the Deep Field, which required Hubble to focus on a single area of sky over ten days to record 1,500 faraway galaxies in that tiny region of the sky, some whose light set off on its journey as long ago as 12 billion years in the past, less than two billion years after the Big Bang and our first glimpse at galaxies forming that long ago.

It won’t last forever though – current projections suggest the telescope’s orbital decay will bring it back to Earth between 2028 and 2040.