Sunday, September 30, 2012

Flattening time

The Hubble Space Telescope is now 20-years-old. The latest from Hubble is called an extreme deep field shot, in which 5,500 galaxies are in view. These are the most distant galaxies ever seen.
"Because of the time it takes for light in the distant universe to reach Earth, when we look at, for example, a star a billion light-years away, we're actually seeing what a portion of the cosmos looked like a billion years ago.
So, by combining pictures of various reaches of a small patch of sky, Hubble's new eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) image, released Tuesday, essentially flattens time. Primitive, 13-billion-year-old galaxies—born just 450 million years after the big bang—seem to float side-by-side with closer, more advanced galaxies."
 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120926-hubble-space-telescope-deepest-most-detailed-view-science-nasa/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ng%2FNews%2FNews_Main+%28National+Geographic+News+-+Main%29&utm_content=Bloglines
via boinky at finest kind clinic and fish market

1 comment:

Terri Wagner said...

Don't believe in the big bang (like the show tho), but I do believe we are not alone in the universe.