Slashdot Mirror
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."
Seriously. Wow. The universe is awesome. Anyone unimpressed is either lying or ignorant.
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.
IANAA, but it is that it is all relative. My gut feeling says that moving 36 million miles is still fairly still in the scale of the universe. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very impressed.
Also consider that this image shows 5,500 or so galaxies in a tiny fraction of the sky. There are something like 100 billion galaxies in the known Universe and trillions upon trillions of stars (cue Carl Sagan). I'd say life on another planet isn't just a possibility, but a statistical certainty. Of course, finding/reaching/communicating with that life might be another matter entirely.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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!
Astronomers spend SO much of their time looking at light-speed forced history that I feel a certain slight is paid to what the present truly may be.
Time is not universal. Across these distances, you can't just take our local clock and apply it to some remote location. Your question of "What is happening 13 light-years away simultaneously with what we consider the present?" just doesn't have an answer on its own. You need to define your point of observation. If you are using us as your observer, then what you see through the telescope is what you get. That's your present day reality.
Astronomers grok this. That's why they don't bother with the science fiction,