The Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 20th Anniversary this week, marking two decades of space observation since it was launched into space by NASA.
Hubble was one of the first space telescopes of its kind, and since 24 April 1990 the continuing space mission has helped unearth some of the greatest modern discoveries in astrophysics, not to mention delivering some of the most detailed and sublimely beautiful images of space man has ever seen.
In honour of 20 years of Hubble we look at some of the seminal moments in Hubble's history as captured in the stunning imagery from the orbital telescope.
1990: After Supernova 1987A was discovered from the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, Hubble resolved a ring of material around the supernova three years later. This image shows the Supernova as the bright pink spiral at the centre the Large Magellanic Cloud.
1992: Hubble identified intergalactic clouds in the near vicinity to Earth. "Near vicinity" is a relative term, the closest is still 160,000 light years away. This is an image of the Supergiant Shell LMC-4 from the Large Magellanic Cloud, approximately 200,000 light years from Earth.
1992: In the same year astronomers located the first pulsar star. A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which pulses radiation; the first was discovered by British astronomer Jocelyn Bell at the centre of the Crab Nebula. Hubble photographed it.
1993: Whilst in orbit Hubble discovered protoplanetary disks, huge rotating disks of dense cloud in the Orion Nebula. The emissions from the protoplanetary disks in this photo are a sulphurous cloud which will birth new stars in the Orion Nebula "stellar nursery".
1994: Unhindered by the light blurring effect of the Earth's atmosphere, Hubble was able to capture detailed pictures of Comet Shoemaker-Levy as it crashed into Jupiter. This picture of the brightest part of the comet was taken before the impact.
1994: The Messier 100 is one of the greatest examples of a spiral galaxy at the south corner of the Coma Berenices stellar constellation. This spiral galaxy was discovered way back in 1850, but it took until 1994 for a picture of this quality.
1995: Hubble added clarity to the discovery of the brown dwarf star GL229B. The brown dwarf was about the size of Jupiter, and thanks to Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera-2, astronomers were able to calculate the star's size and distance from Earth.
1995: The most famous and iconic picture to ever be taken by the Hubble Telescope, the Pillars of Creation depict gas cloud formations several light years long. In a sparkling year for Hubble, not only did the telescope capture this beautiful image, it also allowed astronomers to see the edge of the expanding Universe using the deep field technology.
1996: Hubble resolved the massively energetic quasar galaxies in 1996, witnessing the formation of stars at the core of a galaxy, where the bubble is bursting in this image. This is something no ordinary camera could take.
1997: After a quick space service Hubble was up and running again, capturing the panoramic vastness of star clusters. The 30 Doradus Nebula was a birthing ground for stars in a monstrous landscape of gas and dust.
1997: Whilst Hubble watched the formation of a new galaxy, the telescope also picked up the visible afterglow of a gamma-ray burst. Four months later, the faded afterglow was captured; you can see the distant galaxy with the marked arrow which was the epicentre of the radiation blast.
1998: This picture depicts a close-up of the nucleus of galaxy Centaurus A. Hubble's pictures and subsequent data analysis advanced theories on black holes in the Universe. This picture and others of Centaurus A became a case study in black holes consuming galaxies.
2004: Following from the work on black holes in 1998, these two interspiralling galaxies provided further evidence of black holes. The near-collision of the two galaxies was mapped by Hubble although scientists calculated the two would never collide.
2004: Hubble's major breakthrough of the last decade was in its Ultra Deep Field, revealing the deepest picture of Universe available to visible light. The picture shows some of the first galaxies ever formed after the Big Bang.
2005: One of the closest dwarf galaxies to Earth, NGC 1569 is a prolific bubbling galaxy of new emerging stars. This supernova burst bonanza show colossal galactic explosions which take place at the birth of a star. Astronomers were able to extrapolate theories of how our solar system was formed by watching the birth of stars in the dwarf galaxy.
2006: To celebrate Hubble's 16th birthday composite images were taken of the M82 galaxy were taken from Hubble, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope. The result was a multilayered picture which featured X-ray, infrared and visible light.
2007: As well as advancing our knowledge of deep space, Hubble has also furthered the knowledge of the planets in our solar system greatly. The Jupiter storms depicted show the tempestuous nature of the turbulent planet.
2007: Astronomy's other great mind-spinner apart from black holes is dark matter. Dark matter was originally dreamt up by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s where he inferred that something must exist to account for the missing mass which determined the velocity of clustered galaxies. This dark matter ring is one of the strongest pieces of evidence to this day that dark matter exists.
2008: Following on from the dark matter ring, astronomers postulate that dark matter was created by the collision of two or more galaxies. This image shows a web of dark matter affecting multiple galaxies in a cluster.
2009: One of the most recent glorious images from Hubble. This picture is one of the most advanced and detailed pictures of a stellar nursery in existence, showing hundreds of brilliant blue stars, a number of which are 100 times more massive than the Sun according to NASA.
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