Published: April 21, 2005

MEDIA BRIEFING ADVISORY

The University of Colorado at Boulder will host a media briefing at 11 a.m. on Monday, April 25, featuring new images from the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a worldwide tribute to the 15th anniversary of the orbiting telescope's launch.

The event, free and open to the public, will be held at Fiske Planetarium on Regent Drive southwest of the Coors/Event Conference Center. The program will feature the unveiling of several new images taken by Hubble and will include astronomers from the CU Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy who have used the orbiting telescope to make observations since it was placed into Earth orbit on April 25, 1990.

Hubble has since helped scientists make a number of scientific achievements, including calculating the age of the universe (13.7 billion years), proving the existence of supermassive black holes and detecting the formation of planetary systems throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers have used it to take more than 700,000 photos of celestial objects such as galaxies, dying stars and giant gas clouds, which are the birthplace of stars.

For more information or to arrange media interviews beginning early Monday morning, contact Fiske Planetarium Director Doug Duncan at (303) 735-6141, Jim Scott in the CU-Boulder news office at (303) 492-3114, or Suzanne Traub-Metlay, Fiske's educational program manager, at (303) 492-4073.