Excellent Astronomy Pic o the Day

[photon]

I'm sure some have seen this before but I think it's worth posting.

Links to the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Except for five stars, every point of light in the photograph is a galaxy or a forming galaxy. There's 10,000 objects there, and it represents 1 ten-millionth of the sky. This is the furthest back in time we've seen, the oldest object in the image being only 800 million years removed from the estimated time of the big bang.

Not for the weak of computer though, it's a 6200x6200 JPG. 100+MB of free memory required to view.

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/hudf/

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/new...7/image/a+warn

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/...ubble_UDF.html

[RougeUnderoos]

That is the coolest thing, but is there some sort of "enhancement" going on with that picture? Some of the objects look almost too good to be true -- ie they look like a hurricane pictured from a weather satellite.

[photon]

I don't think so. They talk about how much the furthest objects are redshifted to near infrared so I think it's a visible-light picture all the way (as opposed to some which are composites of different wavelenghts mapped into visible colours).

My favorite quote

The HUDF observations began Sept. 24, 2003 and continued through Jan. 16, 2004. The telescope's ACS camera, the size of a phone booth, captured ancient photons of light that began traversing the universe even before Earth existed. Photons of light from the very faintest objects arrived at a trickle of one photon per minute, compared with millions of photons per minute from nearer galaxies.

1 photon per minute. How cool is that.

[Shawnski]

Originally Posted by photon

1 photon per minute. How cool is that.

One photon per web site is bad enough!!!

Very cool shot. To think that images of Earth from say the dawn of civilization have yet to reach many of these galaxies, even if (as is likely) there is superior intelligent life out there, they might not know WE exist, or how we developed.

Truly interesting subject.

[Neeper]

By looking at all that, how is it even possible people think we are alone?

[Vulcan]

Wow and

Nice landscapes Neeper.

[Cheese]

800 Million years old? Not possible...the Universe is only 6-10,000 years old!

[evman150]

Originally Posted by Neeper

By looking at all that, how is it even possible people think we are alone?

Ignorance.

Those who have even an inkling of how big the universe is know there is no chance we are alone.

It's amazing to think that some of the photons that produced that image have been on a bee line to earth for some ten billion years. Just incredible.

[MJK]

That picture is just amazing!!!

[photon]

Originally Posted by Cheese

800 Million years old? Not possible...the Universe is only 6-10,000 years old!

Well the universe could have been created completely as is with photons already enroute to their destinations. When I paint a painting it's not always a painting of a flower seed, sometimes I paint the flower already grown.

[4X4]

APOD rules. I check it every day and at least 2 times a week, the pic ends up as my wallpaper for a few days.

The other col think about APOD is clicking all the links. You can surf your way from APOD to just about anywhere.

[Bobblehead]

I think Photon is a Digg reader (since this same article is on it's front page as well).

I once saw some scientists trying to figure out what the probabilities were that we were alone in the universe. It was overwhelmingly probable that there is other life in the universe.

No whether or not we will every be able to encounter that life, who knows.

[photon]

Yup, spotted this on Digg. I've had this picture for a while but thought it was worth bringing up.

[Agamemnon]

Lol, looks like the map from Star Control 2

[Cube Inmate]

Funny you should bring up the UDF... I was just looking at my "scientific american" calendar today which has a nice colourful picture of a galaxy on January's page, along with another couple of bright elliptical galaxies on a starfield background (or foreground)..........I looked closer, and something like half of those stars are actually tiny little galaxies.

It gave me a pretty good shiver down my spine to think about it...a trillion stars smushed into a few pixels.

[evman150]

Originally Posted by Bobblehead

I once saw some scientists trying to figure out what the probabilities were that we were alone in the universe. It was overwhelmingly probable that there is other life in the universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

And the numbers they use in that link are just for our galaxy.

It can make one feel very small, all of this.

[photon]

And my favorite, the Fermi Paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_Paradox