3/9/2004: New Hubble deep field

Today they released a new Hubble deep field image, and thanks to Archer for suggesting it although (heh heh) I was already busy downloading the 11MB 6200x6200 TIFF version that NASA made available.

This is the Hubble taking roughly two weeks, looking out at one specific point in space, taking an "extended exposure" of sorts to see what comes out. And this is what comes out: light from the furthest point in space, thousands of galaxies, each containing hundreds of thousands of stars.

Now, see -- look, in the upper-left of that image, there are four galaxies in a row, orange, green, blue, and red?

I "zoomed in" on those, to create the image below, to see how all those dots around them are just MORE galaxies.

There has *got* to be other life out there. I mean, *look* how many of those fuckers there are in just one small region of space, and how many stars, and therefore probable planetary systems there are.

What is the distance (i.e., how far back in time) involved with these galaxies? They are so incredibly varied in shap, size and spectra...just mind-boggling.

HOLY SHIT

Break out the theramin!

And NASA wants to abandon the Hubble...

I really enjoy all the other stuff NASA does, but the Hubble is the best thing they have got going.

http://www.savethehubble.org/petition.jsp

As the late, great, Carl Sagan would say

Billions and Billions

There are more galaxies out there than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world

Griff! You maka me laugh out loud.

And even in just OUR galaxy, there are more stars than you can shake a stick at. I'd say it's just about a lock that there is life out there.

Damn light speed.

Don't quote me on this but I heard them talking about this today, not sure what area they were discussing, but I heard a Trillion galaxies each with a couple hundred billion stars.

Yeah, I'd say the odds of life out there are pretty good.

Love it

These galexies are about 13 billion years old
Check out http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Very cool site if you are into this stuff

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
-William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"

<EM>> It'll never be a vacation destination.</EM>

I find your lack of faith... disturbing...

I find your lack of underpants... disturbing.....

(I think we did that one time too.. or maybe it was back on the Waffle Cellar.)

If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space. -- Thomas Carlyle, looking at the stars.

If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space. -- Thomas Carlyle, looking at the underpants.

just nitpicking, i know, but the photo above took 3 months to capture. the bbc reported that it took 4 months. They began shooting the image in september last year, and wrapped it up in mid january. Wht strikes me is that this is a photo of "one" spot from within a 3D sphere, from our vantage point. i don't know the dimensions of the area photographed, but you have to consider that there is as much evidence of life in all of the other directions this could have been taken in. In 3 months, does all of the light coming from the furthest reaches of the universe show up on the film? Have we seen the outer edge of the universe now? can we then measure it? Does any one know what direction this camera was pointed? toward the center, out from center, laterally? I'm flabbergasted. Evidence of life from a purely overwhelming statistical stand point, I think. But, as Bruce says, it's all so goddamn far away that it doesn;t really matter.

For all intents and purposes, we are alone. Imagine our society in 2500 years, assuming we don;t destroy ourselves or collapse back to the stone age. the growth of technology is exponential. we've all imagined what is to come in the distant future, and first among them is star travel. it seems a relative certainty that some other civilzation would have acheived that level of technological acheivement. However, we are a relative needle in a haystack to them, and again....does it matter? would they have found us?? maybe there's intelligent life in MOST of the systems we can see in tis picture. Why would a civilization from so far away bother with us at all? There might be everything they are looking for in their local galaxy.

I think we will not be the first space faring people, but at the same time, I think we will stillhave to bootstrap ourselves out there. If there was a local starfaring people, we would already have been enslaved or colonized.

Since I doubt that I'll live long enough to see any of the marvels to come, I hope that reincarnation is true. I want to see what happens.

Mask

Does anyone else think that the top-right galaxy of the blowup looks like a masquerade mask with particularly evil eyes?

As far as life on other planets, I'd be amazed if it was aware of us no matter how technologically advanced it is; we've only been sending out radio signals for what, 100 years? And even at the speed of light how many stars are in that radius? Sure we've hit a few stars with classic big band, but do we transmit with enough power for it to be far enough above background radiation for them to even notice? Background from the sun is strong enough that it interfere with current broadcasts between satellites and cable TV viewers.

Great. Now I'm not going to be able to sleep at night knowing that thing is hanging over me ...

Thank you SOOOO much.

Masquerade!
Paper faces on parade . . .
Masquerade!
Hide your face,
so the world will
never find you!

Masquerade!
Every face a different shade . . .
Masquerade!
Look around -
there's another
mask behind you!

(with a tip o' the hat to Andrew LLoyd Webber)

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Oh yes, and speaking of Astronomy Picture of the Day, and sites that update once a day every day (like IotD here), I have a webpage a friend made for me a few years ago that will look at the cookies on your computer, see if you've been to that site today, and if not it sends you there. It's kind of cool; every time I open up my browser it makes sure I've seen today's pictures. If anyone's interested in something like that let me know and I'll send it along / post it. (I originally made it to make sure I went to the Hunger Site every day, but I didn't want that to be my homepage because, well, it's not so good as a portal).

>Anyway, I also wonder if everything is moving away at a faster speed or is it the further away the galaxy the faster it is moving which means that the separation between galaxies is increasing which kind of suggests that the universe will die a cold, lonely death at some point.<

That's what they say what will happen. One day all the energy will have been transformed into head and the temperature will be the same in every point of the universe, and it won't be hot!

Just to give a bit of perspective

If you go along with modern big band theory, which makes pretty good sense to me, then this map gives you a decent idea how far back the light we are looking at was created. It's pretty close to the beginning/end of the universe, and really close to the distance where there would be any light to even be seen.

u click the button, and the space shuttle whistles off.

Then it whistles back, and with pictures.

And then everybody sees those pictures.

And no one challenges those pics, since they've never been there.

i'm not a physics prof, but i thought that if an object in motion was not encountering any contrary action, then the motion would continue as it is. including a state of acceleration. if it's gaining speed, and there's nothing to slow it down, why would it stop gaining speed?

one of you bookworms has to know this.

on third thought, as i re-read my point, why would it continue to gain speed if there was nothing adding further impetus?

so, then, why ARE these galaxies increasing in speed?

was this just your fancy way of saying, "uh, i dunno?"

or are you saying that no-one knows?

What the fuck...
Can't we just look up to the stars and enjoy the feeling of being tiny and unimportant considering these enorm distances?
Come back to earth and see the world with better eyes, stop bothering and be happy?

That's what I think seing these pictures...

sure we could, pi, but that doesn;t leave much room for impressing each other with the profundity of our thoughts.

Quote:

Originally posted by lumberjim sure we could, pi, but that doesn;t leave much room for impressing each other with the profundity of our thoughts.

No, you're still confusing the ; for the '

We know you're you.

If the Universe is curved (call it a hypersphere), is there the possibility of looking all the way through the Universe at ourselves?
The ultimate in self-reflection.

Oh shit. I'm going to have to read "A Brief History of Time" again.

I have the edition with the nice color pictures.

I'm fighting an urge to just curl up in a little ball of agoraphobia and wait for the peaceful sleep of oblivion. My. There's lots of stuff that's very very far away, isn't there?

And you guys are geeks.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene proved that the earth was round and even accurately computed it's circumference prior to his death in 194 B.C.

See below link for more details:
http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/obs.../eratosthenes/

I realize that belief in the bible and God isn't too popular around this message board, but if you're of that bent this is what the bible has to say about the earth being round:

(NIV) Isaiah 40:22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.

Did Columbus know that the earth was round? How bout this nasa site?
http://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Lcolumb.htm

So why did my teachers tell me the whole flat earth crap in school? Who knows?

Sorry, didn't mean to be a thread jumper

Einstein's equations take the amount of matter and energy in the universe (assumed, again by the consideration of symmetry, to be distributed uniformly) and as output, they give the curvature of space.

The tough part is... how much matter and space is there really out there?

The way I understand it, if all matter and energy in the universe were to be smeared uniformly throughout space, and if, after this was done, there turned out to be more than the so called critical density of of 10 to the -23 grams in every cubic meeter (about five hydrogen atoms per cubic meter) Einstein's equations would yield a positive curvature. If there were less than the critical density, there would be a negative curvature, if there were EXACTLY the critical density, the equations would tell us that space has no overall curvature.

It's impossible to prove this without knowing how much matter and energy is out there, and how it's spread out. Don't you agree?

They are only beginning to delve into "dark" matter and speculate their could be more of it than any matter we were formerly aware of.
But, the WMAP (WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE) team has come up with a time line.

Life? I thought we already found that in the meteorites from Mars. Now intelligent life, that would be something. But even still, it would not likely be life that could paint Van Gogh's sunflowers, or come up with Louis Armstrong's West End Blues. Or even conceive of a movie called Snakes on a Plane.

Life? I thought we already found that in the meteorites from Mars.

Quote:

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce HTML Code: Life? I thought we already found that in the meteorites from Mars. There was a big brouhaha about that, but when they got down to the nitty gritty, peer review cast a lot of doubt that it was indeed remnants of lifeforms.

the universe is open.