The Most Significant Photograph...

Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image

www.dennismook.com

What do you think is the most significant photograph ever made?  Any idea?  For me it is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image and, secondarily, the Hubble Deep Field images.  Those two images have profound implications.

A little background.

In 1994, astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a portion of the sky that had nothing.  No galaxies, no stars, no planets had ever been seen there.  It was just black.  The portion of the sky would be similar to a single grain of sand at arm's length.  Not very big.  They turned on the telescope for 10 straight days.  One by one, photon of light accumulated.  When they processed the image, to everyone's amazement, that grain of sand sized portion of the empty sky had 3000 galaxies in it; not stars, but galaxies of a 100 billion or more stars in each!  The farthest of those galaxies was over 13 billion light years away from us.  (a light year is the distance light travels in one year)  Each one of those photons left the galaxy and then, over 13 billion years later, arrived on the sensor of the telescope.  Each light year is almost 6 trillion miles away!  TRILLON! Not a mere billion or a paltry million, but trillion.  Multiply 6 trillion by 13 billion and you get a pretty big number of miles away, to put it mildly!

Then in 2004, they did it again in a different part of the sky.  This time Hubble was left open for 11 days with better detectors and better filters.  This time, in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image (above), they found 10,000 galaxies, the oldest of which was about 13.2 billion years old!

The human mind cannot fully comprehend the kinds of numbers here.  We cannot fully comprehend the size of the universe.  Our closest star neighbor is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.22 light years away.  That is 4.22 X 5,865,696,000,000 miles or almost 24 trillion miles away--and that is our closest neighbor in which the light from that star arrives in just over 4 years.  Now imagine stars where the light arrives in over 13 billion years.  See what I mean about comprehending distances?

If anyone ever tells you that you can't look back in time, you correct them and say we all can.  Each time we look at a star, we are looking at how that star looked billions or years ago, not today.  It might not even been there today.  In fact, taking that one step farther, every time you see anything, you are looking back in time.  It might be a nano second, but what you perceive with your eyes, depending upon how far the object is from you, is seen in the past.  Even what you see everyday, the sun, you see what it was like 8 minutes before.  So if the sun every explodes, we will know 8 minutes after it does!  Don't worry, that is predicted in another 4 or 5 billion years from now.  The human race probably won't even be in existence then.

Enjoy!

Thanks for looking.
Dennis Mook