Another important piece of technology is the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope is an enormous telescope that is actually suspended in low orbit around our planet. Since it was launched in the 1990s it has made many discoveries and led to scientific breakthroughs. Some of the more important discoveries are focused on galaxies, stars, and other planets. The Hubble Telescope is responsible for the discovery of galaxies affecting one another via dark matter and gravitational pulls. According to Hubble's website, the telescope studied other galaxies and noticed that they can draw near each other due to their own gravity and can even collide and merge. The Hubble Telescope has also focused on star behavior and the death of stars, also known as a supernova. When stars die out they sometime end up exploding, and can leave behind a black hole due to the amount of energy released. This was not a known fact before the Hubble Telescope.
Similar to the Hubble Telescope, there are other machines used to gain information about the universe. Recently, the Dark Energy Survey, a five-year effort to gain photographic information of the sky in the Southern Hemisphere, has discovered nine dwarf galaxies surrounding the Milky Way. According to a recent article in the Tacoma News Tribune by Rachel Feltman, these galaxies were found near the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the two biggest dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Using this information, scientists can track the galaxies and observe how they react and what effects dark matter has on them and what it is truly capable of. Sergey Koposov of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy exclaimed, "The discovery of so many satellites in such a small are of the sky was completely unexpected . . . dwarf [galaxy] satellites are the final frontier for testing our theories of dark matter." Koposov then goes on to explain that observing these galaxies can show us whether or not our cosmological picture is accurate.