The Most Important Image Captured By Mankind

[Evolution.]

My science teacher is going to love this video.

 

[DuckRacer]

Nice find. 👍

My brain hurts now.

 

[WallRunner]

Nice, my dad is going to love that.

(also the first 1:30 of the video has the same song as my solar system explorer intro)

From,
Chris.

 

[3-Wheel Drive]

Makes you realize that, in all reality, we are nothing. Insignificant, unimportant.

Really puts it into perspective.



..Anyways, here are two other good ones I've found. They aren't videos, and aren't nearly to the level of the Youtube vid, but are still worth a look:
The Universe Within
A Tiny Glimpse

The first one goes from veiwing universe from 10mil light years, zooming down to the subatomic level.

 

[Lee]

Still just a whole load of big numbers to me..

 

[TopHat]

I've seen the universe within, its good. Too bad my school banned Youtube.

The video itself is mindboggling, and hope that someday we will communicate with other beings. Maybe somewhere out there, there are other planets with simulntaneous thoughts that we have, typing on a computer, browsing gtplanet.yog.

 

[OZZYGT]

I had the Hubble Ultra Deep Field as my wallpaper a couple of weeks ago. It's really amazing how deep we can look into the space...yet no sight of another type of life has been spotted.

Nice find M.O. + Rep











nevermind, I must spread some more points first

Ciao!

 

[Keef]

That's cool and all, but there's a problem. There's no computer screen on earth that can really convey the magnificence and detail of that ultra-deep field picture. I don't think there ever will be. I don't know the resolution of that picture, but I'm sure They don't make any cameras that can match it.

Anyway, the video wasn't spectacular. Sure, it's and important picture, but it didn't really make me cry, like I hoped it would. I want a video so enthraling that I slip into a deep, eternal depression from its convincing humans-are-nothing message. I wouldn't mind seeing a video that gave me butterflies and made my mind scared to go outside and look at the nearly invisible sun.

So who's idea was it to label all those fancy Hollywood people "stars"? What's so important about stars?

 

[GT4_Rule]

That was a pretty good video. Amazing.

 

[kikie]

I use to watch that show when it was on. Don't know if he was still alive then. Going to watch MachOne's vid later on.

 

[Slick Rick]

MO's vid didn't really hit me. 'A tiny Glipse' did though... even though they are showing the same thing...

 

[speedy_2]

Pretty cool. But, "single most important image." uhh yeah ok.

 

[Touring Mars]

Here are some more pictures from Hubble... some of them are just amazing...

​

 

[exigeracer]

Does anyone know where I could find some higher resolution pictures of the main picture or the ones TM posted? Nothing huge, just suitable for a background.

Thanks.

 

[Danoff]

Here's the HDF

It has to be put in context with TM's pictures - each of which is beautiful and awe-inspiring to think about. When you consider that each of these little blobs is one of those beauties (actually, it looks like TM's pictures are nebulae, and these are galaxies - but who cares about a few orders of magnitude right?), and when you consider that it's just a tiny patch of nothingness in the sky, and consider how much nothingness there is in the sky, it messes with your head.

 

[GT4_Rule]

Wow. The first two images from TM are simply breathtaking.

 

[Touring Mars]

Does anyone know where I could find some higher resolution pictures of the main picture or the ones TM posted? Nothing huge, just suitable for a background.

Thanks.

Check this site out

 

[exigeracer]

Merci Mr. M

 

[Delirious]

Four words is all it takes to fully explain why this is so beautiful to me...

God's hand in creation.

 

[Touring Mars]

It has to be put in context with TM's pictures - each of which is beautiful and awe-inspiring to think about. When you consider that each of these little blobs is one of those beauties (actually, it looks like TM's pictures are nebulae, and these are galaxies - but who cares about a few orders of magnitude right?), and when you consider that it's just a tiny patch of nothingness in the sky, and consider how much nothingness there is in the sky, it messes with your head.

Yes, according the HDF website, it took so long to accumulate this image, and this image is of such a small part of the sky, that to take an image of the whole universe at this resolution and in this quality would take over a million years.

If astronomers made the Hubble Ultra Deep Field observation over the entire sky, how long would it take?

The whole sky contains 12.7 million times more area than the Ultra Deep Field. To observe the entire sky would take almost 1 million years of uninterrupted observing.

Also, the image posted by danoff is amazing, but these objects are so far away that by the time the light has reached us from them, they have travelled much much further away from us that they appear in this image. It has been estimated that the most distant galaxies from us are over 40 billion light years away by now (even though we can see them at 'only' about 13-14 billion years away...)

 

[PLmatt91]

Noob sauce = me... So can some one please explain to me what this really is / means?

 

[Touring Mars]

Simply put, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope which shows some of the most distant objects (galaxies) that have ever been seen by us.

However, what is significant about this particular image (in danoff's post) is that we are able to see objects (galaxies) that are so distant, that we are actually seeing them at a time very early in their formation - infact, very near to the beginning of the Universe itself. By studying a whole set of galaxies (all at different stages in cosmic evolution) we can start to understand the very processes by which galaxies form. The further away the object we can see, the farther ago in time we are seeing that object from - this picture (amongst other things) is proof that the Universe is truly ancient and that galaxies don't just come 'ready made' - that they are the result of a complex and massively long formation process (guided by the laws of physics).

Of course, like I mentioned in an earlier post, the objects seen in this image are no longer where they appear to be, since we are seeing them as they were many billions of years ago. At this precise moment in time, all of these objects are actually many billions of lights years further away than we can see them today.

 

[socomplayer2]

makes me feel so small and insignificant

 

[Famine]

Simply put, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope which shows some of the most distant objects (galaxies) that have ever been seen by us.

However, what is significant about this particular image (in danoff's post) is that we are able to see objects (galaxies) that are so distant, that we are actually seeing them at a time very early in their formation - infact, very near to the beginning of the Universe itself. By studying a whole set of galaxies (all at different stages in cosmic evolution) we can start to understand the very processes by which galaxies form. The further away the object we can see, the farther ago in time we are seeing that object from - this picture (amongst other things) is proof that the Universe is truly ancient and that galaxies don't just come 'ready made' - that they are the result of a complex and massively long formation process (guided by the laws of physics).

Of course, like I mentioned in an earlier post, the objects seen in this image are no longer where they appear to be, since we are seeing them as they were many billions of years ago. At this precise moment in time, all of these objects are actually many billions of lights years further away than we can see them today.

And if you were to look at that bit of sky, you'd see nothing at all...

Yet in that nothing there's trillions of stars, and if only one in a thousand stars has a planet or planetary system around it, and only one in a thousand was capable of supporting life, that's still millions of life-supporting planets out there, in a patch of sky less than one ten millionth of the visible universe that you think has nothing at all in it.

That's millions of Earths in nothing. Imagine what there is in something...

 

[exigeracer]

And Imagine what there is in something...

There would be hot gasses. The nothing in discussion is what the Ultra Deep Field sees, and the something is everything else, so stars, galaxies, planets and other dots and smudges in the sky. What is nothing is interresting, as the picture shows, but what if nothing was everything, if we weren't in the realm of the Milky Way galaxy? There would something even more interresting.

 

[PLmatt91]

That is awesome man. Really good stuff besides what else is going on in the world

 

[Famine]

There would be hot gasses. The nothing in discussion is what the Ultra Deep Field sees, and the something is everything else, so stars, galaxies, planets and other dots and smudges in the sky. What is nothing is interresting, as the picture shows, but what if nothing was everything, if we weren't in the realm of the Milky Way galaxy? There would something even more interresting.

Who what how with a where why when?

The point of the Deep Field and Ultra Deep Field images was to look in a piece of sky that appears completely featureless, with a very, very long exposure, to see what was there a really, really long way away (or time ago. Whatever).

To Earthicans there's nothing there.
To telescopes there's nothing there.
To radio telescopes there's nothing there.
To Hubble's DF/UDF images there's trillions of stars and thousands of galaxies.

So in a piece of sky where we think there's absolutely nothing, there is, in reality, oodles of everything. Point being, if there's that much stuff hiding behind absolutely nothing, just how much stuff is there in the bits of the sky where we can already see things?

Of course if Hubble looked in a bit of sky where something already is for the same amount of time, you'd end up with a very, very bright picture of that object and not see anything like the UDF image behind it - the "local" light sources overwhelm the more distant ones.

And you'd expect, if we could shield the local sources, the UDF image to be repeated everywhere Hubble looks. The whole universe is packed with galaxies and globular clusters, with literally septillions upon septillions of stars.

This is the relevance of the Ultra Deep Field. We can see around 300 stars of a clear night by the naked eye, and it's easy to think "Wow. Space is so big and empty" - especially when you learn things like "If the Solar System were reduced in size to 10 metres, the nearest star would be 40 miles away". But the sky is just crammed full of stars - there's more stuff out there than we can possibly imagine and, suddenly, the idea that we're alone in the universe is completely idiotic.

 

[Keef]

Originally Posted by Famine
...there's more stuff out there than we can possibly imagine and, suddenly, the idea that we're alone in the universe is completely idiotic.

Indeed.

I don't know if most people ever think about it, but they should realize that those 300 or so stars we can see with our eyes are all in our own gallaxy. There are another ~400,000,000,000 (billion) stars in our galaxy. Basically, we can only see the houses on the street we live on, much less our whole block, neigborhood, town, city, county, state, country, etc.

That's a lot of stars, but the funny thing is that there are a few billion more galaxies out there, as shown by Hubble's images. And we can't see a damn one of them with our eyes, much less our grandpa's telescope. We can't see many with any telescope on earth.

What Famine means by "nothing" is that if you glanced in that area of sky, even with the Hubble, you literally would see nothing. If you looked there for a few minutes, you wouldn't see a thing. But, when the Hubble stares in the exact same spot for days on end, the imperceptably dim light from those "invisible" gallaxies starts to make a print on the "film". It's almost just like your eyes adjusting to a dark room. After a while you can see just fine, but that while makes all the difference.

If Hubble could zoom in even farther, past the brightest gallaxies in the Ultra Deep Field, and could stare for weeks or months, we would see the same thing over again--thousands of tiny, malformed baby gallaxies. Or we might not see a damn thing. Truly, nothing. Now that would make me feel insignificant.

 

[Slick6]

One of the things that amazes me most is that the light being given off of these galaxies and stars is actually billions of years old. Which means that many of those galaxies have become no more and new ones have formed of which we have not seen light of.

 

[Shannon]

Pretty amazing in the fact that light travels at what, about 300,000,000 metres a second. So, if it took one year for the light to reach us, that means the thing giving off that light is around 9,460,800,000,000,000 metres away (if my maths is correct).

That's only one year, so how far away are these distant galaxies if the original photons of light from the formation of them still haven't reached us in billions of years?