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[off camera] Well if you looked at the night's sky through a soda straw what would you

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see. Turns out quite a lot using the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Hubble's newest and final frontier field image shows us how

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vast and crowded our universe is when it looked at just a tiny

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portion of the sky. So what exactly is a galaxy

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and what superpower did Hubble use to capture this new image. We're joined

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by Dr. Padi Boyd at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Thanks for joining us.

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[Boyd] My pleasure thanks for having me. [off camera] So start by telling us what is a galaxy

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and can you show us what Hubble has seen?

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[Boyd] Well a galaxy is a collection of many stars. The Milky Way galaxy, our galaxy

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has about a hundred billion or more stars in it. The star is just one of

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a hundred billion or million. We live in a beautiful spiral galaxy

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That's about a disk shape that has gas and stars

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orbiting around the center. And this is a beautiful Hubble image of

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two spiral galaxies. One is seen edge on, where we see that dust

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and ther one one is seen more face on where we can start to see the structure of the spirals.

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Galaxies near us look like that, but when we look at something a very small

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region of the sky and we stare at it for hours and hours up to a

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100 hours. We start to see galaxies coming out from

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very far distances from us. And we're looking at the evolution

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of galaxies as a function of time in these frontier fields.

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[off camera] Talk about what superpower did Hubble use to see the faint and distant galaxies

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in this new image. [Boyd] Well it's nothing more than the superpower

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of gravity. We know that mass influences space

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time and Einstein's theory of relativity predicted that

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mass bends space time and that even light would bend around it. What that

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means is that very massive structures can bend

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the light from behind it like a funhouse mirror. And in images like

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frontier fields, the mass of the foreground galaxy cluster

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magnifies the galaxies behind it so that we can start to put

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a picture together of those most distant galaxies. We can even use the

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mass to magnify galaxies that started, that were forming

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in the first 100 million years of the history of the universe

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and those little red specks there are what we think are some of the first galaxies

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to form. [off camera] Now I understand there's something

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called dark matter. That sounds like something a villain would use. How do

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missions like Hubble help us learn more about one of nature's biggest secrets?

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[Boyd] It is one of nature's biggest secrets because we can't study it by

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using traditional methods like looking at the light that it gives off. That's

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exactly why we call it dark matter. But even though it's dark to our eyes

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it does have mass and you can't get away from the fact that mass does have mass

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that impacts it surroundings. It impacts space time. So using an image like

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the frontier fields here and how it's distorting the galaxies behind us

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behind it, actually allows us to map out the dark

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matter. And that dark matter then we can use it as a lens

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to look further behind in the universe. We now know that dark matter makes up

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80 percent or more of the mass of the universe.

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And that's just an amazing fact. Dark matter is in individual galaxies

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and impacts the way that the stars move in those galaxies. So we can study

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the motions of stars in individual spiral galaxies and get another handle

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and a hint about where dark matter is and how it's distributed.

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[off camera] Now Hubble just celebrated it's 27th birthday. What

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is next for the famous space telescope? [Boyd] So 27 years on

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orbit and Hubble is still going strong. And that's because

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during it's lifetime astronauts visited the telescope and they outfit it with

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new components and new instruments. And the last time astronauts visited

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the telescope they really tuned it up. So it's still at the peak of it's scientific capabilities.

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And we expect that to continue for years, working very closely

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really hard to make sure that Hubble is still operational when we launch the next

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big thing. The Webb Space Telescope which will launch in 2018.

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Together these two very powerful space telescopes will be able to

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look at the universe in slightly different types of light and give us

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a broad picture of what's happening in galaxies nearby and even in the distant universe.

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[off camera] Where can we learn more and see some

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more of Hubble's images? [Boyd] If you go to nasa.gov/hubble or you follow us on

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Twitter @NASAHubble you can find all kinds of information

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and images we discussed today and many of the other programs that the Hubble Space Telescope

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has done from galaxies to objects in our solar system

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to stars, star forming nebulas. Check it out and learn more.

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[slate]