Since then Hubble has helped astronomers catalog a number of disks where planets may be forming. Hubble provided the first direct visible-light proof for such disks. Such planet-assembly disks had been hypothesized by 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, based on the architecture of our solar system. But the first Hubble clue that exoplanets should be common in our galaxy came in 1992 when immense disks of dust-the raw material for planet formation-were photographed swirling around many of the stars in the Orion Nebula, a young star-forming region 1,500 light-years from Earth. Hubble was not designed to look for exoplanets. The doomed systems look like hapless comets, with wayward tails of gas boiling off the withering, pancake-shaped disks. These four snapshots show dust disks around embryonic stars in the Orion Nebula being "blowtorched" by a blistering flood of ultraviolet radiation from the region's brightest star. In the absence of evidence for exoplanets, there was a lingering theory that our solar system was possibly a freak accident. This was first hypothesized by Giordano Bruno in the early 1600s. The challenge to astronomers is that the feeble glow of a planet is drowned out by the fierce glow of its parent star. However, science fiction stories in movies and television made planets around other stars seem commonplace in such films as Forbidden Planet and the Star Trek television series. In the absence of any observational evidence, the idea was treated skeptically by some astronomers. BackgroundĪs Hubble was being built, there was no evidence for the existence of planets around other stars. These groundbreaking techniques server as proof-of-concept for future telescopes to assess extrasolar planets for their potential habitability. Hubble’s sharpness and broad wavelength coverage allowed astronomers for the first time to probe the atmospheres of these worlds, including their chemical composition and weather systems. The Hubble Space Telescope has been at the forefront of exploring planets around other stars. Four Successful Women Behind the Hubble Space Telescope's Achievements.Characterizing Planets Around Other Stars.Measuring the Universe's Expansion Rate.
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