NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope may be aging, but it regularly delivers images of astronomical wonders, and now its operators have come up with a novel new trick to get the telescope to measure stars at a distance up to 10 times farther than previously possible.
According to NASA, this new technique – called spatial sprawling – enables the Hubble to measure the distance of stars up to 10,000 light years away.
“This new capability is expected to yield new insight into the nature of dark energy, a mysterious component of space that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate,” said Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.
