Space Telescopes: Unlocking the Secrets of the Universe

Hello everyone,

We explored what is an exopanet in the last post, we tried to understand the importance and the methods astronomers used to discover the exoplanets, we also studied how astronomers use technologies to look further into the exoplanets and find out about their characteristics and nature. Today I want to talk about the one of the technological marvel and the technology which enabled us into look further into the space and uncover it's mysteries. Yes I'm talking about space telescopes, these technological marvels still orbiting around earth and providing us with lots of information about space.

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In this post I'll write about the importance of telescope, their capabilities and I'll write about some of the popular space telescopes. Telescopes lets us take a deep look into the depth of space and observe it with so much details where it would be impossible to do with the naked eye. Space telescopes are one of our key inventions in understanding the space. It's also lets us look into lots of phenomena that occurs more than thousands of light years away and by calturing the light from deep space, astronomers can identify and understand these phenomena and helps scientists to answer fundamental questions about them.

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Space telescopes have some compelling advantages compared to those installed on earth. Since they are orbiting above atmosphere, there are no light pollution to disturb the image captured by space telescopes, and it can capture some variety of wavelengths since some of the lights from space can be filtered while it passes through the atmosphere of earth. And space telescopes can observe a certain spot in space or a star for a long period of time compared to the telescopes installed in earth. So we can observe a certain phenomena or we can time lapse a certain spot on space.

some of the famous telescopes are:

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• Hubble space telescope: hubble space telescope which was launched in 1990 is one of the most iconic and influential telescope in history. Hubble space telescope captured all kinds of interstellar objects and phenomena such as nebula, distant galaxies, exoplanets, stars etc. It's also helped us understand a lot about cosmos.

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• Chandra X-ray observatory: chandra xray observatory which is launched in 1999, helped us discover the high energy universes. By capturing x ray from distant galaxies, chandra xray observatory helped us to capture and study about most powerful space phenomena such as supernova, blackhole,etc.

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• Kepler space telescope: *kepler space telescope, launched in 2009 has only one objective, that is " is there a planet like earth on milkyway", since then kepler space telescope have been discovered thousands of exoplanets on milkyway by the transit method which we talked about in last post. By observing the dip in brightness of a star, when an exoplanet passes infron of the star, scientists can estimate the size of the exoplanet. Kepler helped scientists to discover and study exoplanets for habitability since then.

image captured by hubble space telescope
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The space telescopes have been played a major role in our understanding of space, this is a piece of technology which helped scientists to discover things that are unimaginable. I know i left james webb space telescope, i want to make a dedicated post about james webb telescope in future. I hope you learned something new today. I had lot of fun writing this post.

Thank you and steem on!