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Edited Date/Time
4/17/2021 7:29am
This blows my mind, and it will/should blow yours.
Many of you may know about this, but this is the ‘Hubble Ultra Deep Field’ photograph. It is the most important photograph ever taken.
It was taken by the Hubble space telescope in 2003. They pointed it at the darkest, emptiest, most uninteresting patch of sky they could find. An area of space that was just black, with nothing in it. They opened the camera’s shutter for about ten DAYS and captured the attached image.
Every speck of light, smudge and mark you see in that photo is not a star, it is an ENTIRE GALAXY. And every one of the 10,000(!) galaxies in the image itself contains billions of stars. There are trillions and trillions of stars in that one photo, each with the likelihood of several planets orbiting them.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per SECOND. That’s 667 MILLION miles per hour. In one second light would travel around the circumference of the Earth 7.5 times. Yet the stars and galaxies in that image are so far away that even at that speed it has taken the light around 13 BILLION years to reach us.
To put that in context, for half of the light’s journey to us the Earth wasn’t even here…
What we see in that photo is what the galaxies looked like 13 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang. Many of them probably don’t even exist anymore, but new ones will have been born in their place.
But what’s most incredible to me is that the area of space in that photo is the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. That photo shows the number of observable galaxies in one twenty-six-millionth of the area of the sky. It’s the number of galaxies in nothing...
Humbling, isn’t it?
Search ‘The most important photo ever taken’ on Youtube.
Many of you may know about this, but this is the ‘Hubble Ultra Deep Field’ photograph. It is the most important photograph ever taken.
It was taken by the Hubble space telescope in 2003. They pointed it at the darkest, emptiest, most uninteresting patch of sky they could find. An area of space that was just black, with nothing in it. They opened the camera’s shutter for about ten DAYS and captured the attached image.
Every speck of light, smudge and mark you see in that photo is not a star, it is an ENTIRE GALAXY. And every one of the 10,000(!) galaxies in the image itself contains billions of stars. There are trillions and trillions of stars in that one photo, each with the likelihood of several planets orbiting them.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per SECOND. That’s 667 MILLION miles per hour. In one second light would travel around the circumference of the Earth 7.5 times. Yet the stars and galaxies in that image are so far away that even at that speed it has taken the light around 13 BILLION years to reach us.
To put that in context, for half of the light’s journey to us the Earth wasn’t even here…
What we see in that photo is what the galaxies looked like 13 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang. Many of them probably don’t even exist anymore, but new ones will have been born in their place.
But what’s most incredible to me is that the area of space in that photo is the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. That photo shows the number of observable galaxies in one twenty-six-millionth of the area of the sky. It’s the number of galaxies in nothing...
Humbling, isn’t it?
Search ‘The most important photo ever taken’ on Youtube.
Ever.
jk
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Great thread and topic, Rob!
Sorry for the long vid, there are excerpts of specific topics on YT. Could listen to this guy for days.
Stars are nice to look at.
Carl Sagan
yep ... its just fun stuff to think about.
A small(very) sense of pride anytime Hubble's mentioned. I was a snot-nosed college grad and my first job was on a Lockheed(Sunnyvale) computing help desk in IS operations in '91. A staff analyst in the Hubble program called and said "I need you guys to have another go at fixing this printing problem." Went through a couple procedures and understanding the issue more, but no progress.
Got up from my desk and went over to the programmer in charge, explained the issue, and he took a look. He found the problem and fixed it within days(multitasking his other requests). End user was stoked and sent a glowing accolade to my manager understanding I didn't fix it personally, but appreciated the effort and follow through.
And entropy
I think, and I’m probably wrong
Tiny blue and green jewel
Quite rare
No one is leaving this planet alive
Ecological bottleneck
Survival of the fittest is a dead corpse
Altruism
Humility
Population control
Individuals
Truth?
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