QUESTION:
What new discoveries have been made with the Hubble?

ANSWER from Trisha Borgman on April 25, 1996:
Wow--what a great question!  There have literally been thousands and
thousands of new discoveries made by the astronomers who work with the
Hubble Space Telescope!  Some of these discoveries have been
observational confirmations of ideas which had already been predicted
by theorists, while others have been observations of completely new
phenomena!  Let me try to give you just a few examples...

One of the consequences of Einstein's theory of General Relativity
is the existence of black holes.  Astronomers have been searching
for about 30 years for proof that black holes do exist, and we
have accumulated a good amount of evidence to support their
existence.  Before HST, much of this evidence came from radio and
x-ray astronomy.  However, HST has been able to peer waaaaaaay down
into the center of galaxies and actually observe the outer rim
of supermassive black holes!  So, HST has made significant contributions
to the search for black holes.

You may have seen the picture of what are called "protoplanetary disks"
in the Orion Nebula.  This was a beautiful image of a section of
the Orion Nebula which actually revealed disks of dust circling
young stars in the nebula.  While images such as this helped to
confirm some of our ideas about how stars and star systems
(i.e. planets orbiting stars) form, it also raised many new questions
for us to investigate.

If you have been watching the "Live from HST" broadcasts, you
probably heard Heidi Hammel mention that the Great Dark Spot on
Neptune has disappeared!  This Dark Spot was originally discovered
when Voyager flew past Neptune back in 1989.  However, recent
HST data (including the data from YOUR orbits!) showed us that the
Dark Spot is gone!  That was a big surprise to astronomers!!

But these three examples are a VERY small fraction of the wonderful
science which has been accomplished by HST.  New data are coming
down from the telescope every minute of every day, and each new
image has something new to teach us!  Astronomers are using HST to
study all kinds of phenomena, from planetary observations to
black hole searches, star "birth" studies to observations of
incredibly distant galaxies!  We have used HST to take pictures of
Comet Hyakutake as it passed close to Earth, and to observe the
most distant quasars which we can possibly see!  The Hubble Space
Telescope is a remarkable instrument, which has been made possible
by the dedication of thousands of people.  From the technicians who
built the telescope itself to the astronomers who use it, everyone
involved with the HST has worked very hard to push the limits of our
knowledge about the Universe.  Today is the sixth anniversary of the
HST launch, and although HST has done remarkable things in these
six years, there is much more still to be done...

(I encourage you to watch the HST World Wide Web pages at
http://www.stsci.edu for more information about new discoveries!)

-Trisha Borgman