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Deepest Optical Image Of The Universe To Date

Posted by michael on from the asa-eight-million dept.

fenimor writes "The deepest optical view of the universe, obtained by Hubble Space Telescope, may turn out to be some of the earliest star-forming galaxies. The telescope has looked 95 percent of the way back to the beginning of time, to glimpse whether the hottest stars in these early galaxies may have provided enough radiation to 'cool' the universe after the big bang."

3 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. A question by T.Hobbes · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I was thinking about these photos, and came upon was seems to me to be a paradox. OK, so the Hubble takes this ultra-deep image of a point in space. This is said to be an image of the universe X billion years ago, and Y billion years after the big bang. All well and good.

    Now, so far as I know, intersteller distances are measured by the light year; Alpha Centuri is ~4 light years away, etc.

    I extrapolate from this that this ultra-deep and ultra-old image of the universe is both the _oldest_ and the _most distant_ image yet taken.

    The problem is this: You can point the hubble in any direction, and get an equally old image. Further, if you take a deep enough image, you can (theoretically) take an image of the Big Bang itself (or X million years after it, whatever).

    The paradox to me, is that this means the Big Bang can be conceptualized as a the outer edge of a sphere that surrounds us. You can, with the telescope, image in any direction in all three dimensions, and your limit wrt distance in any of those directions is the big bang. So the big bang is the edge.

    Now, this seems absurd to me, so I obviously got something wrong somewhere. Does anyone know what I got wrong?

    1. Re:A question by NonSequor · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The universe isn't neccessarily Euclidean. There are all sorts of funky ways it can loop back on itself.

      --
      My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
  2. We were part of the big bang too. by geoswan · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The matter that makes up the Earth, you and I, the sun, our Galaxy, was all part of the explosion we call the Big Bang. So you don't have to look far away, and deep into the past to see something that was once part of the Big Bang. Everything you look at, including the nose on your face, was once part of the Big Bang. So, the Big Bang is not the edge of the Universe.