Hubble Sez: The Universe is Bigger Than You Think

Written by Michael

My brother at Caltech turned me on to this site, which offers high-resolution, large format reproductions of images from space. This one, for example, is a 11-day-long exposure from the Hubble telescope in 2003.

Over 10,000 galaxies are in this photo; each galaxy contains millions of stars. And this is a section of the sky that seemed to be filled with…nothing.

Is it me, or did my career just get a lot less important? I wonder how much money it cost to take this picture, expressed in bailouts? Knowledge needs lobbyists, goddamn it! Perhaps instead of propping up banks, we should be concentrating on, I don’t know, LEARNING MORE ABOUT THIS?

Looking at this photo, I am convinced of two things:
a) We are not alone.
b) We are really big dopes.

The site itself is nicer about it; of course, they want you to buy stuff.

Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute have unveiled the deepest photo of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the million-second-long exposure photo reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called “dark ages,” the time shortly after the big bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dark universe. The new photo should offer new insights into what types of objects reheated the universe long ago.

This historic new view is actually two separate images taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Both images reveal galaxies that are too faint to be seen by ground-based telescopes, or even in Hubble’s previous faraway looks, called the Hubble Deep Fields (HDFs), taken in 1995 and 1998.