Happy Birthday Hubble

This month, the Hubble space telescope turns 25! The Naked Scientists celebrate its birthday by hearing all about its incredible achievements, from discovering exoplanets to finding evidence that the universe is expanding. Carolin Crawford from the University of Cambridge reports...

Carolin - Well, yes, we had Paul celebrating his 45th birthday this week. Well Paul, you share it with the Hubble Space Telescope. It's been phenomenally successful telescope - the are a number of different things that we've discovered from it, whether it's actually probing the atmospheres of other planets for example. And yet, when it was launched, we barely knew that there were planets surrounding stars. Now, we're measuring what their atmosphere is made of.

That's just one of the many things. It's played a clear pivotal role in so many of these major discoveries. And it's because its got this exquisite detail in its resolution, but the fact you can simultaneously see objects in ultraviolet, the visible and the infrared means you're seeing different processes going on.

So, it's still going and it looks -if it carries on in this health, it could continue for another 5 years, funded up to 2020, so I think it's pretty successful.

Kat - Happy birthday Hubble!

Carolin - Happy birthday Hubble! As I'm someone who spends so much of my time explaining astronomy to the public, one the greatest legacies are the amazing images that really have caught the public's imagination and have inspired I think so many people into an interest in astronomy has been phenomenal.  So yes, happy birthday Hubble!