A look back at Hubble's best images

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope wasn't able to send images between June 13 and July 15, 2021. A faulty computer memory system halted the telescope's operations. Only retired NASA experts managed to get it working again. For more than three decades, Hubble has provided fascinating images of distant stars and galaxies.

This is one of the most photogenic examples of the many turbulent stellar nurseries the Hubble Space Telescope has observed during its lifetime. The portrait features the giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbor, NGC 2020, which together form part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This satellite galaxy of the Milky Way is approximately 163,000 light-years away.

Just as a new episode of "Star Wars" hit cinemas in 2015, Hubble took this picture of a cosmic lightsaber. The celestial structure is located about 1,300 light-years away. It's the birth of a star system — two cosmic jets beaming outward from a newborn star and some interstellar dust. The space telescope takes breathtaking pictures. Here are some more …

Since 1990, the king of all space telescopes has been orbiting Earth at a speed of over 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour) and an altitude of 340 miles (550 kilometers). Hubble is 11 meters (36 feet) long and weighs 11 metric tons (12.2 US tons), making it comparable in weight and size to a school bus.

Hubble has helped us understand the birth of stars and planets, approximate the age of the universe and examine the nature of dark matter. Here we see a gigantic ball of gas created by a supernova explosion.

Different gases emit all kinds of different colors. Red, for instance, is a sign of sulfur. Green is hydrogen. And blue is oxygen.

The first pictures Hubble sent back were a catastrophe, however, because its main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. In 1993, Space Shuttle Endeavor took experts to Hubble to fix the problem, giving it a pair of glasses. That was just one of five updates the telescope has received over the years, the last one coming in 2009.

Hubble took this amazing picture in December 2009. The blue dots are very young stars, just a few million years old. This kindergarten of stars is found in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy, and a satellite of our Milky Way.

How about this snapshot from space? Nobody really knows what exactly Hubble had in its lens here, but that doesn't mean the shot is any less stunning. This image is just one of over 30,000 that Hubble has captured for the ages.

This virtually transcendent photograph is — like most Hubble images — a composition of many single shots. The Sombrero Galaxy is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the Virgo constellation and is located a mere 28 million light-years from the Earth.

The telescope was named after the American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953). He was the first person to observe that the universe is expanding. With this finding, he paved the way for our current cosmological understanding of the Big Bang as initiator of the universe.

These column-shaped structures are found in the Eagle Nebula, around 7,000 light-years away from Earth. They were documented by Hubble and have received worldwide recognition under the name "Pillars of Creation."

Hubble is going strong, again. Due to its constantly sinking orbit, however, the telescope may reenter the Earth's atmosphere in 2024 and burn up. But its successor is already set: James Webb, being tested inside a thermal vacuum chamber here, is scheduled to be launched this year. Its workplace will be about 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) from Earth.

This, by the way, is another one of Hubble's creations — a space smiley! The easy explanation? It was made by bending light.