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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.
Seriously. Wow. The universe is awesome. Anyone unimpressed is either lying or ignorant.
It would have been longer but the guy with the finger on the shutter button had a sudden nose itch, and well, you know how it goes.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
They took many exposures totaling 23 days. From TFA:
This image is the combined total of over 2000 separate images, and the total exposure is a whopping two million seconds, or 23 days!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Mere shadows on the wall of a cavern.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
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!
I think Carl put it best:
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
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 amount of time that intelligent critters who can manipulate tools and create recognizable radio signals for communication is likely to be very brief. In less than a century, data compression and encryption will make almost all of our radio traffic look like static from the outside. The vaguely intelligible bits sent out prior to that are so weak that they'll likely never be received or interpreted. Bottom line? Lack of intelligent radio indicates nothing.
Jupiter's natural radio emissions are much more powerful than the total of all Earth-based signals. Even if one was looking for radio signals from our system, we wouldn't be the loudest voice.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law