The Young Chronicle: For Grade 3 November 21st, 2014 | Page 3

YOUNG CHRONICLE

November 21st , 2014

HAPPY 25, HUBBLE!
For thousands of years humans have gazed up into the night sky in wonder. There are countless stars in the universe, but
we can only see a maximum of 2,500 of the brightest ones with the naked eye (from any given spot on earth).
The trouble with looking at stars from the earth is that you have to look through the thick, warm and slightly wobbly
atmosphere, and that cuts down the amount of detail you can see. In the early 1920s scientists realised that a space
based telescope would not suffer from the problem of having to look through the atmosphere and so would allow the
study the universe in much greater detail. However, it wasn't until the 1970's that the human race had both the resources
and the technology to send a telescope up into space; and after 20 years of development, the Hubble Space telescope
was launched in 1990.
What is the Hubble Space Telescope?
The Hubble Space Telescope is a large telescope in
space. It was launched from the space shuttle
Discovery Centre on 24th April 1990. It takes pictures of
planets, stars and galaxies. Hubble has seen the birth
and death of stars. It has seen galaxies that are billions
of light years away. Hubble has also seen comet pieces
crash into the atmosphere above Jupiter.

Hubble is named after an astronomer, Edwin P. Hubble.
He made important discoveries in the early 1900s. He
found many galaxies in the universe. His work also led
to the idea that the universe was getting bigger, as if from a big explosion. Scientists call this explosion the Big
Bang. The explosion would have happened billions of years ago, and it is contemplated that the Earth and the
rest of the Universe was created because of the Big Bang.
Read More about the Hubble, on Page 6. Click on ‘Full Version’, if You Aren’t a Subscriber Yet.

Spacecraft Philae Lands on a Comet
After more than a decade of travelling through space, a robotic lander built by the European Space Agency (ESA) has made the first-ever
soft landing on a comet. The lander is called Philae, and it reached comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday, Nov. 12th . Quite a
complicated name right!

Fair enough! But what is a comet?
A comet is an icy small Solar System body that heats up when it passes
close to the sun, and begins to release gasses that have probably been
frozen into it’s surface. As it passes close to the sun, it gains a visible
atmosphere or ‘coma’, and sometimes also a tail. The word comet has been
derived from comet.

Coming back to Philae, the lander sent images from the comet. These were
the first images ever taken from a comet’s surface. Philae also drilled into
the surface to study the composition and witness closely how a come