Scientists help capture images after launching telescope on a balloon as big as a football stadium 

British scientists have helped create mesmerizing images of galaxies using a balloon the size of a football stadium.

Thanks to Durham University and an international team of astronomers, a £4.1 million balloon telescope successfully launched from New Zealand’s Wānaka Airport on Sunday.

The Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope – known as SuperBIT – was sent out on a 100-day mission to investigate the mystery of dark matter.

Hovering at 108,000 feet above Earth, it has already captured some breathtaking images of the antenna galaxies collide 60 million light years away.

These spiral galaxies began colliding several hundred million years ago, making them among the youngest colliding galaxies to be witnessed by astronomers.

Pictured: The Antennae Galaxies – one of the closest and youngest examples of interacting galaxies known – despite starting a few hundred million years ago

The balloon is now on a 100-day mission to investigate the mystery of dark matter in space

The vibrant pink Tarantula Nebula, a large star-forming region 161,000 light-years from Earth, was also photographed.

Durham University said: ‘Our astronomers are part of an international team behind the successful first research flight of an innovative balloon telescope that will investigate the mystery of dark matter.

“SuperBIT has already captured its first images on this flight, showing the “Tarantula Nebula” – a region of the Large Magellanic Cloud where new stars are being born, and the collision of the “Antenna Galaxies” NGC 4038 and NGC 4039.”

SuperBIT’s primary purpose is to measure the properties of dark matter, which consists of particles that do not absorb, reflect, or emit light.

Despite being completely invisible to the human eye, dark matter is all around us and poorly understood.

SuperBIT is trying to explore numerous theories about the matter, including whether it can be delayed, distributed, or even chipped.

It will also try to map the matter around galaxy clusters by measuring how it distorts the space around them, known as “weak gravitational lensing.”

To do this, the telescope is at an altitude above most of the Earth’s atmosphere – a suitable height for many astronomical observations.

Images similar to those from the Hubble Space Telescope will also be collected by the balloon telescope.

The SuperBIT telescope launched from New Zealand’s Wānaka Airport on Sunday

The balloon-based telescope was praised for being much cheaper than rocket-based telescopes

While the Tarantula Nebula was previously captured by both Hubble and NASA’s new $10bn (£7.4bn) James Webb Space Telescope, the SuperBIT has its own advantages.

Astronomers at Durham University claim the telescope has a wider field of view than Hubble and costs 1,000 times less than a comparable satellite.

Using helium is also much cheaper than rocket fuel, with NASA also agreeing that balloon-based telescopes are a lot cheaper.

The SuperBIT team is a collaboration between NASA, Durham University, the University of Toronto in Canada, and Princeton University in New Jersey.

Designs converged two years ago in July, at a time when massive science projects were taking off in an effort to map the dark matter in the universe.

The James Webb Telescope: NASA’s $10 billion telescope is designed to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies

The James Webb telescope has been described as a “time machine” that could help unlock the secrets of our universe.

The telescope will be used to look back at the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and to observe the sources of stars, exoplanets and even the moons and planets of our solar system.

The massive telescope, which has already cost more than $7bn (£5bn), is thought to be a successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope

The James Webb telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of about 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 Celsius).

It is the world’s largest and most powerful orbital space telescope, capable of looking back 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.

The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, as the two will be working together for a while.

The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990 via the space shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It orbits Earth at a speed of about 17,000 mph (27,300 km/h) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles altitude.