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The Deepest Picture of the Universe Ever Taken: the Hubble Extreme Deep Field

Posted by Unknown on from the do-the-dew dept.

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."

3 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Hard to imagine the vastness by icebike · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Hard to imagine the vastness by Matheus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I was pondering on this recently and was thinking the following:

      1) Light travels at that good ole' speed it does.

      2) Scientists continually marvel at the fact they are seeing the universe far away the way it was millions or billions of years ago.

      3) I never hear them comment on the fact what they are seeing has changed as much as our near universe in all of that time.

      SO... what's to say we're not looking at the beginnings of literally millions (+?) of civilizations that in a few million years would look to the Hubble like we do now from up close?

      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. The universe may be absolutely teaming with life that we won't be able to even see the beginnings of in ours or even our great-great-great-great-...........-great-great-grandchildren's lifetimes.

      Anyway... back to pondering...

  2. So much in so little sky... by As_I_Please · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.