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A few years ago, I heard a story from Jon Lomberg about an astronomer who did something a little crazy. After waiting in line for months or more for his chance to take a picture with the Hubble telescope (a resource every astronomer on the planet wants a piece of), he wasn't quite sure what he wanted to do with his sliver of time. He didn't want to do what had been done a thousand times already, and he didn't want to have to hope for a one in a million chance of picking out a star more or less randomly and hoping to find something interesting about it on closer inspection.
Instead, he picked out a big open patch of darkness, a gap between visible stars. It was crazy. You wait and wait for your five minutes of usage time, and then waste it by pointing it at empty space? But he figured that there was a chance that maybe there was a dim, distant star or something out that way which could be picked up. At least it would be original. A place no one had looked at before. So the techs shrugged and pointed the telescope at the patch of empty space. Zoomed in as far as it could go. And saw...
Galaxies. An uncountable number of galaxies. The image was more densely filled than just about any known star cluster, and it was full of distant galaxies. The wide, unimaginably populated universe. Mind-blowing.
Since then, other patches of empty space have been investigated, and every single one has been just as full. Seems the starlight was blocking our view of deep deep space, and seemingly empty patches of sky are actually places where we can look out between the lights of our own galaxy and see the vastness outside.
And now the Hubble telescope has taken the deepest image yet. Galaxies further out than any we've seen before. It's a view into the distant past (thanks to the delay in light coming from so far away), a view that shows us galaxies just forming, younger than we've ever seen.
NASA posted the picture today along with a brief article.
Pretty much every dot in that image is an entire galaxy, and that's from zooming in on one tiny spot between the stars in the night sky. It's a mighty big universe out there.
Also posted today is a new pretty picture of the moon taken by the Galileo spacecraft.
Instead, he picked out a big open patch of darkness, a gap between visible stars. It was crazy. You wait and wait for your five minutes of usage time, and then waste it by pointing it at empty space? But he figured that there was a chance that maybe there was a dim, distant star or something out that way which could be picked up. At least it would be original. A place no one had looked at before. So the techs shrugged and pointed the telescope at the patch of empty space. Zoomed in as far as it could go. And saw...
Galaxies. An uncountable number of galaxies. The image was more densely filled than just about any known star cluster, and it was full of distant galaxies. The wide, unimaginably populated universe. Mind-blowing.
Since then, other patches of empty space have been investigated, and every single one has been just as full. Seems the starlight was blocking our view of deep deep space, and seemingly empty patches of sky are actually places where we can look out between the lights of our own galaxy and see the vastness outside.
And now the Hubble telescope has taken the deepest image yet. Galaxies further out than any we've seen before. It's a view into the distant past (thanks to the delay in light coming from so far away), a view that shows us galaxies just forming, younger than we've ever seen.
NASA posted the picture today along with a brief article.
Pretty much every dot in that image is an entire galaxy, and that's from zooming in on one tiny spot between the stars in the night sky. It's a mighty big universe out there.
Also posted today is a new pretty picture of the moon taken by the Galileo spacecraft.