epa03817047 (FILE) A National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) handout photo made available 20 May 2009 and taken by an STS-125 crew member aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis shows the Hubble Space Telescope as the two spacecraft continued their relative separation on 19 May 2009, after having been linked together for a time to complete a final servicing mission for the orbital observatory by sevral Shuttle crew spacewalks. NASA on 08 August 2013 reports that astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have solved a 40-year mystery on the origin of the Magellanic Stream, a long ribbon of gas stretching nearly halfway around our Milky Way galaxy. A team of astronomers, led by Andrew J. Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., USA, determined the source of the gas filament by using Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to measure the amount of heavy elements, such as oxygen and sulfur, at six locations along the Magellanic Stream. They observed faraway quasars, the brilliant cores of active galaxies, that emit light that passes through the stream. They detected the heavy elements from the way the elements absorb ultraviolet light. EPA/NASA / HANDOUT HANDOUT EDITORIAL USE ONLY