The Deepest Picture of the Universe Ever Taken: the Hubble Extreme Deep Field 185
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers have unveiled what may be the deepest image of the Universe ever created: the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, a 2 million second exposure that reveals galaxies over 13 billion light years away. The faintest galaxies in the images are at magnitude 31, or one-ten-billionth as bright as the faintest object your naked eye can detect. Some are seen as they were when they were only 500 million years old."
Hard to imagine the vastness (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, I officially feel small now.
I'm not sure whether to be more impressed by:
1) the scale of the universe itself
2) the ability of some insignificant bags of protoplasm on an insignificant planet near a run of the mill star, in a less than impressive galaxy could find a way to actually see that far
3) the fact that they held the camera that steady for 2 million seconds (23 days)
4) That the camera moved 36 million miles during those 23 days and it didn't make any difference in the final image.
But other than that, the image looks exactly like a gazillion other images from Hubble, so one has to take it on faith that it is what it says it is.
Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hard to imagine the vastness (Score:2, Interesting)
> because how could Time itself start 14.6 Billion years ago?
. /sarcasm What! You mean don't follow the dogma/nonsense that out of nothing came time and space!? Heretic! ;-)
--
"If energy can neither be created nor destroyed, then logically the universe must of have ALWAYS existed."
Re:Hard to imagine the vastness (Score:5, Interesting)
I was pondering on this recently and was thinking the following:
1) Light travels at that good ole' speed it does.
2) Scientists continually marvel at the fact they are seeing the universe far away the way it was millions or billions of years ago.
3) I never hear them comment on the fact what they are seeing has changed as much as our near universe in all of that time.
SO... what's to say we're not looking at the beginnings of literally millions (+?) of civilizations that in a few million years would look to the Hubble like we do now from up close?
Astronomers spend SO much of their time looking at light-speed forced history that I feel a certain slight is paid to what the present truly may be. The universe may be absolutely teaming with life that we won't be able to even see the beginnings of in ours or even our great-great-great-great-...........-great-great-grandchildren's lifetimes.
Anyway... back to pondering...
Re:my God... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think Carl [bigskyastroclub.org] put it best:
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Re:Hard to imagine the vastness (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd say life on another planet isn't just a possibility, but a statistical certainty
I'd say that the liklihood of us being the only life is remote, but not certain. And if there is life out there, it may well be that we simply don't find it, because it was here long before us, long after we become extinct, or just too damned far away (which would be any galaxy except our own).
There may be something special about his rock. We just don't know. Until we find life elsewhere, there is no life elsewhere.
So much in so little sky... (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA's page about the eXtreme Deep Field [nasa.gov] has a picture showing the amount of sky photographed compared to the size of the moon. It looks like all 5500 galaxies could be covered up by a grain of sand held out at arms length.