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The Deepest Picture of the Universe Ever Taken: the Hubble Extreme Deep Field
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."
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
2 million seconds is 33,333 minutes which is 555 hours which is 23 days. You mean they took an exposure for 23 days to get this image?
I'm not saying it can't be done, only that this seems a bit off.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Seriously. Wow. The universe is awesome. Anyone unimpressed is either lying or ignorant.
Anyone have this image in 1920x1080?
...it's full of stars! OK so I used the tagline from a movie. But then it is cool to see this stuff so far away while most of us mortals toil in our cubicles. Almost unreal like it's Photoshop (SETIcon II had panel discussion and one topic debated are difficult to tell actual images from CGI. Hint: don't process the raw images from scopes and spacecraft).
mfwright@batnet.com
I can see forever!
Is the image noisy or are those grey dots something that I should take note of?
So many stars and still that Great Silence. Not a single, not even remotely meaningful signal.
When one looks at ancient neolithic art on stones or on animal bones, a meaningfulness, an intelligence is immediately visible. Not a slightest doubt when one sees it.
But billions of stars and not a single radio message. Not even a more or less complicated rhythm. Just background noise.
Could it be that we see sort of a mirage?
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm curious about the statement that some we are seeing around 500M y.o. Can someone tell me what that is based upon? I'm not up on the latest numbers but I thought the universe was to be approx 14B y.o. Does it take into account increasing expansion of space over that period? Does it assume we are at the furthest point away from those other galaxies (or are they saying it only extends 500M light years beyond us)? I understood all of it except that side comment. /noob question.
Mere shadows on the wall of a cavern.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
If our universe is 14.5 Billion years old, and these galaxies we see are about 13 Billion light years away, shouldn't they be spread out much further apart? I would expect to only see a few galaxies in this picture.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-
room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
-Walt Whitman
Happy people make bad consumers.
Judging by the title of this article, I somehow expect to see links to the goatse.cx site...
Science doesn't promote itself. If there were any justice in the world, the Hubble team would be as celebrated as any sports team. This is certainly a much greater accomplishment than anything that happened at the Olympics. But that's not the world we live in. We need people like Phil Plait to publicly celebrate science. If there's a bit of self promotion in there too, so be it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
We need Jack Handy's take on this!!
Check your ego.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
humbled by the profoundity of the universe
Jesus, you act like he's the Second Coming of Roland Piquepaille. Bad Astronomer's stuff is on-topic for the Slashdot crowd. A look back 13 billion years is interesting, and we count on guys like Bad Astronomer to bring it to our attention. Why don't you fuck off back to AOL or wherever it is you come from?
Here is the original link to NASA http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/xdf.html .
Is there a reason old Philly gets so many articles pushed up on Slashdot? Or is it the discovery channel that's gamed Slashdot?
The objects in the image are viewed when they were only 500 Million years old. If only we'd discovered how to build the hubble telescope a few hundered million years earlier, we could have looked at the beginning of it all...
Is the 2382×2078, 2 MB JPEG the full version? I'm really impressed by that one, and I realise it goes for depth (faint objects) and not size, but just wanted to check...
NASA's page about the eXtreme Deep Field 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.
The word "universe" means "all things taken as one."
Thus, we don't need the word "multiverse." Anything meant by "multiverse" would logically already be included in the meaning of "universe."
One will never discover a "parallel universe," but rather, a parallel part of the (even bigger than we thought it was before) universe.
This is why I think life on another planet isn’t just a possibility but a statistical certainty. There are 5,500 galaxies in this tiny segment of the sky. (IIRC, the original Deep Field took up about the size of the moon in the sky.) There are 5,500 galaxies there. This means there must be tens of thousands (if not hundreds of galaxies), each with millions (if not billions) of stars. Even if only a tiny fraction of those stars had planets which could support life, there would be a huge number of life-sustaining planets out there. For this to be the only planet where life arose would be extremely unlikely. Mind you, this doesn’t mean we can reach that life nor does it mean that life can reach us. It doesn’t do us any good right now if a billion light years away Zorax is looking up at the stars from Xelex Prime wondering if there’s any life out in the Universe. The Universe might be teeming with civilizations, each so far apart that not only are communication/travel impossible, but that merely being able to detect another civilization’s existence might be a rarity. Imagine a Universe full of lonely civilizations wondering “Is anyone out there?”
NASA noted a cloud of Baryons likely goes out more than 300,000 light years out from the center of the Milky Way (maybe 70,000 light years in radius by memory).
The Baryon cloud is at a temperature of 1-2.5 million kelvin !!!
Hence, with your Warp Drive you won't need to worry about a warm Burma Shave. In fact you won't worry any more at all as you will assume an equal position with the Baryons.
It is almost time to point the cameras in precisely the opposite direction and repeat the process to see whether there is any similarity in images.
Ancient galaxy clusters and galaxy collisions! This is all strong evidence that the universe doesn't have a beginning.
http://bigbangneverhappened.org/
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
How does it make you feel to know that you have to comment 14 times a day to get a single post modded up? You sure do run your mouth a lot.
Jam it in your ass. No one said any of the shit you're going on about. I'm talking about astroturfing... especially when there is a much more insightful article linked from the astroturfer's article. Pulling shit like that use to mean you were a shitball around here.
How does it make you feel to know that you have to comment 14 times a day to get a single post modded up? You sure do run your mouth a lot.
No need to fret that Hatta's sum total contribution to this site is so much greater than your own. You'll get over it, I promise.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Ever want something as a kid and years later get it as an adult? That happened to me when I found that Life magazine classic from the 1950s “The World We Live In” in a used bookstore. Words cannot describe the awesomeness. Did I mention the Chesley Bonestell art? It has a photo of tiny fuzzy specks two billion light years away, the most distant galaxies ever seen, or about 15% of the way to the limits of this field. At that time, telescopes had penetrated to magnitude 23. Magnitude 31 was so far out of the question it was absurd. And yet there’s something about some of those old black and white photos that presents an air of tantalizing mystery that I don’t get from these glorious modern images. As for the angular area of a sphere, an easy way to picture it is the circumference C = 2pi r. The area of a sphere is 4pi r^r = C^2/pi. This gives us the area in terms of the circumference and neatly avoids dealing with the radius of the Universe. Since C = 360 degrees, A = 360*360/pi
than an NFL referee. Glorious, glorious science.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Ah. I remember the days when I was only 500 million years old. We had good times back then. I only wish I could be 500 million again. Sigh!
You're absolutely right, we need more self aggrandisement on slashdot, I hear they are revamping their format too! Did the CEO's of digg move over here?
But please lets get more egomaniac bloggers stealing legitimate content just to get them another shit show on Discovery Channel!
I hear they hired phil because the sharks wanted more money.
astrology is so awesome.
Is this a picture of the Whole Universe, i.e. full 360 degree (or whatever the 3d term is) or just a really really zoomed picture of a tiny spot in the sky?
Also, is this an image made from light, or processed using various bands of the EL spectrum? (i.e. does it really look like that?)
You need rivals to make it into a rah-rah team sport. Take politics as the model, people will line up behind their choice regardless of whether their policies make sense to them.
Besides, what's the big deal with this. God clearly made it all.
Personally I prefer the 2004 Hubble Ultra Deep Field
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap040309.html
Warmer picture (it's been my desktop background for the past 8 years), and the contrast and detail seem to be better (compare closer spiral galaxies) than the Extreme Deep Field. Lower noise as well.
The "exposure" time and sensitivity and science of the Extreme is impressive, but for viewing pleasure I'll take the HUDF.
The baryon cloud may be 1-2.5 million kelvin but it's probably spread so thin that it would have little effect on a large object passing through it.
Ludicrously deep field!
No, of course not. God communicated through people, through human beings and human words. The inspiration-by-dictation idea is a red herring, a false dichotomy: that God either dictated Scripture word-for-word or that it's all a fiction, of purely human origin. And athiests say that Christians are narrow-minded! Who says that God couldn't have taken a middle way, using humans to communicate to humans? If God exists, who are we to say what he should or shouldn't do?
If you think about it, it may be that it was in his wisdom that he did this. For example, after the Exodus, when the Israelites were at Mount Sinai, all the people trembled and were afraid when they heard and saw God's presence up on the mountain. How would you feel if the creator of the universe--a being who knows both every star in every galaxy in the universe and every subatomic particle in every atom of every molecule of every hair on your head--approached you directly? I imagine it would indeed be terrifying!
We can't even comprehend the size of the parts of the universe we can see; we can write down estimates of numbers, but we can't truly comprehend it. So how could we expect to truly comprehend a being that is infinitely bigger than the universe?
The sad truth is that human arrogance knows no bounds. Just like in the story of Adam and Eve, we want godlike knowledge, and we actually think we can attain it. Then we look at something like this and realize, we're nowhere near even understanding what we can see. We can't even comprehend things we can see with the naked eye, such as the nature of personality or consciousness or gravity, much less the remotest galaxy billions of light-years away.
But in our arrogance, we say, "Surely we can know all these things soon, and can understand how the universe and ourselves were created--surely there is nothing beyond our understanding; therefore the existence of a being that is larger than what we can see or understand must be impossible. There cannot be an intelligent entity larger and more powerful than ourselves, or than what we can become."
It's like the tower of Babel all over again, just with science instead of bricks.
Time will tell, but we'll all be dust by then. In the meantime, Christ said that the time to repent is now, because the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Tomorrow is not promised to anyone. Proceed at your own risk. Consider carefully how much you can really be certain of. Keep an open mind and seek the Truth before your time is up.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
No rhythm? No pattern? Why are you only looking for radio signals, for indications of intelligence as defined by yourself?
By my standard, anyone who does not paint his face green and hop on one foot is an irrational fool. By my standard, I have never seen a rational person in my life (including myself), just background noise.
I would argue that the patterns seen in galaxies and stars themselves are quite meaningful, complex, and rhythmic.
And I would argue that that is the most significant message you can find among the stars. The irony is that it's staring you right in the face, you who are so desperate for a sign, yet you don't--or won't--see it.
Then, since you don't see what you want to see, you make up a story to explain why the evidence doesn't match your presuppositions, rather than evaluating the evidence itself.
If you'll allow me to anthropomorphize the universe: the universe is laughing at you, with sadness.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."