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Hubble's Upgrade: Pretty Pictures
EReidJ writes "The Hubble Space Telescope has come out with astonishing new pictures, our "deepest glimpse[s] into the depths of space and time". An article on the photos is here. These are striking in their beauty, and are sure to become commonplace desktop images in the next month. The official site to view all of the photos is here, but the site's already going pretty slow. washingtonpost.com has the four photos in series on its home page." There are also stories on space.com and MSNBC.
Does anyone else just feel absolutely tiny when they find thousands of entire galaxies in a small patch of the sky? Galaxies contain billions of stars, and God knows how many planets... Kinda makes the silly things we argue about here on slashdot seem just that- silly.
Just a thought.
Any of you astrophysics types out there, can you help me with this? Do you think that the whole concept of dark matter is in a lot more danger now that billions of new galaxy's will come to light? This seriously must tip the size and weight of the universe.
It also makes all problems here on earth seem so petty and insignificant compared to the grand scheme of things.
Consider this:
Homo Sapiens has been running around for roughly 200,000 years.
We've had the ability to reach space for roughly 50 years.
We've been able to fly for about 100 years - incidently, we visited all the places on the planet at about the same time.
The first demonstration of the incandescent light bulb was roughly 120 years ago.
The first steam engine was 220 years ago.
The entire North American continent was unknown to Europeans 600 years ago.
The earliest known forms of writing date to about 5500 years ago.
Not only are we small, we're brief too.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
But you always hear people saying that looking into deep space is like looking through a time machine.
I think that what they're referring to is the fact that because the stars you can see are so far away it takes light emitted from them a very long time (think: millions of years for some...) to reach us; hence what we see when we look up at night at a particular star is the way that star looked millions of years ago, not the way it is now. For all we know it could well no longer exist - in that sense we're looking at the past.
Its nice to see that every once and a while the millions and millions of dollars that the american government pours into the space project does provide us with great results
With the new advent of space-tourests speding $20 mil to get into space (with russia), the idea of science and research in space is getting put in the back seat. An example of this is when both of the tourists went into space i saw them on the news, but as of yet today i have not heard a peep about this (on the headlines).
Hopefully as more and more people look at space to answers more and more questions , it wont remain a area that is of lesser inportance to popular opinion
Medevo
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.