Hubblecast 23 special: seeing the invisible

In this new Hubblecast Special episode, Dr. J guides us through the fifth chapter of Eyes on the Skies, the International Astronomical Union's movie celebrating the telescope's 400th anniversary in 2009.

The Eyes on the Skies movie explores the many facets of the telescope – the historical development, the scientific importance, the technological breakthroughs, and also the people behind this ground-breaking invention, their triumphs and their failures.

The Universe is a black void, with a scattering of stars, nebulae and galaxies – or so it appears to observers using visible light. But if we include other forms of radiation invisible to us, the picture changes completely: clouds of interstellar hydrogen gas, emitting radio waves; stellar nurseries, glowing in the infrared; explosive outbursts of gamma rays and the all-sky background hiss of the Big Bang, diluted by almost fourteen billion years of cosmic expansion. So how do astronomers learn about the unseen Universe? By building telescopes and detectors that can see the invisible. Watch this Hubblecast episode and find out more.