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On 4th July, national holiday in the US, the Hubble Space Telescope reached an impressive milestone: 1 million science observations!
The millionth observation was of the extrasolar planet HAT-P-7b, a gas giant almost twice as massive as Jupiter, discovered by the Hungarian Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) on 6th March 2008. This planet orbits the star GSC 03547-01402, about 1000 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus.
HAT-P-7b is one of the extrasolar planets being observed by the dedicated telescope, Kepler, (and so is also called Kepler 2b), and orbits its star at a distance of only 5.7 million kilometers, making it a so-called "Hot Jupiter", with atmospheric temperatures over 3000 Kelvin. Its orbital period is just 2.2 days.
Hubble was pointed at this distant planet to try to detect traces of water vapour in its boiling atmosphere, using the spectrometer of the Wide Field Camera 3.
Launched on 24th April 1990 with Shuttle mission STS-31 (piloted by Charles Bolden, the current NASA administrator), the HST has now exceeded 21 years of activity, studying the full range of celestial objects, and revolutionalising almost every field of astronomy from planetary science to cosmology.
Over this long period, 50 terabytes of data have been accumulated, all (or almost all) made available to scientists and the general public at
http://hla.stsci.edu.
In the illustration above, all the observations up to 27th June are indicated in Galactic coordinates. The key on the left relates the colour of the point to the type of object.
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