Gravitational traps in space, black holes, come in different sizes. Or more correctly, different masses, because they are all infinitely small. The first black hole ever discovered, in 1971, weighed in at 21 times our Sun's mass. It was formed by the explosion and collapse of a star. Examples of a completely different class of black hole were identified in the 1960s-1970s. They weighed in at millions to billions of times our Sun's mass. Like all supermassive black holes, those monsters dwell in the center of major galaxies.

So, black holes can be super-big or super-small. The missing link is an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing roughly 100 to 1,000 times our Sun's mass. A handful have been found in other galaxies. Perhaps they are on the road to growing into supermassive black holes.

Hubble features a 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in) mirror, and its five main instruments observe in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to capture extremely high-resolution images with substantially lower background light than ground-based telescopes. It has recorded some of the most detailed visible light images, allowing a deep view into space. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as determining the rate of expansion of the universe.