NASA's Hubble Space Telescope blasted into orbit on April 24, 1990, making it 34 years old. For this birthday, the Hubble team has turned the aging observatory toward the Little Dumbbell Nebula, also known as Messier 76 or NGC 650/651. Hubble might not be as sharp or sensitive to faint infrared signals as the shiny new James Webb Space Telescope, but it can still take a stunning snapshot.
The Little Dumbbell Nebula hangs in space about 3,400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. It's what's known as a planetary nebula, which doesn't have anything to do with planets. The term is a holdover from generations ago when astronomers with much fuzzier telescopes thought these objects looked like distant planets. In reality, they're clouds of dust and gas thrown off by collapsing stars. The star in the center of M76 was a red giant, but it is now collapsing into a white dwarf stellar remnant.
Hubble sees the nebula from the same perspective as ground-based telescopes, but its image is much clearer. The central "bar" shape is actually a ring seen edge-on. The rest of the sloughed material is collected in two "lobes" on either side of the ring. These swirls are driven by stellar wind from the dying star, racing across space at two million miles per hour.
Astronomers believe the ring may have been sculpted by an unseen companion star orbiting the collapsing white dwarf. Hubble can't see this supposed star, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist—it may have been swallowed by the collapsing star, or Hubble may not be able to spot it through the envelope of gas. The nebula will dissipate in about 15,000 years, a relative blink of the eye in cosmological terms. At that point, the white dwarf will be all that remains of the former solar system (unless that mysterious companion star has survived). A similar fate might await the Sun in a few billion years.
The Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages Hubble and other space telescopes, says that Hubble has conducted over 53,000 observations since its 1990 debut. The institute holds more than 184TB of processed Hubble data, maintaining access for astronomers around the world. To date, about 44,000 scientific papers have been published using Hubble data. Despite long since surpassing its expected design lifetime, the telescope is still in high demand. Time on Hubble is reportedly oversubscribed by a factor of six to one.
Recently, NASA extended Hubble's mission until June 2026, and it may push the date a bit further out. However, the observatory hasn't been serviced since 2009, and it's run out of redundant hardware. One more bad gyroscope and Hubble may not be able to control its orientation. The telescope's decaying orbit could bring it into the atmosphere as soon as 2028 or as late as 2040. There has been some talk of another servicing mission, but no concrete plans have been announced.
