This is awesome. Literally.
The ten most amazing Hubble photos—sent by a friend, and surpassingly beautiful.
Here’s my favorite, perhaps because of its simplicity. But please look at them all; you’ll be glad you did. They might even put you in a holiday mood, if you’re not there already.
The pictures are beyond awe inspiring and they have numbers to match.
“It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across”
How does anyone wrap their brain around those numbers?
50,000 light years is fairly small. If I’m remembering right, the Milky way is more like 120,000 light years in radius. Of course, all of those numbers are a bit fuzzy, as it is hard to put discreet boundaries on things like this.
and all of it here for absolutely no reason other than the personal pleasures of the members of the left…
as a physics guy… the numbers alone AND the key point that the universe doesnt exist outside a observers observation…
that it takes a universe of such size to create a reality that is big enough to encompass the complexity of life… AND to have the key argument unprovable, is a clue in and of itself…
GEOPAL…
those are SMALL numbers!!!!
and the way we used to was to let god wrap his brain aroudn them, and for us to accept the limits of human intelligence inside the system (as kurt godell defined).
there are about 100 billion stars in the milky way..
the pistol star might be the largest known star by mass… 100-150 times the size of the sun… it has a radious of 100 million miles.
LBV 1806-20 might have a mass more than 200 times that of the sun and is about a million times brighter than the Sun!
(athiests of course are bored by this… ho hum).
cD galaxies are about 100 times more massive than our galaxy, and can have a diameter of 6 million light years… (and the minute we get out to populate our galaxy… no political will could stop freedom.. which is why space exploration has all but stopped compared to what we were doing)
here is some fun perspective… (enjoy!!!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I34FNr_peUk
and remember… the resources of the solar system are ours to use… so when you hear that natural resouces are going… they forget space.. then again… space means a loss of control again… a fracturing of power, and so they are seeking stagnation again to hold it for as long as possible..
the genetic legacy in all of us speaks a lot about the tactic.
scientists estimate that from the poiont we reach another star, it will only take about 500 to 1000 years to colonize the milky way..
another version… this one going larger than suns..
showing the galaxies…
Hubble Deep Field: The Most Imp. Image Ever Taken (Redux)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgg2tpUVbXQ&feature=related
Well I guess the only ones who can actually start to grasp the 800 billion suns are congress – ’cause that’s less than the annual budget.
On a more serious note it actually amazes me that they were considering not fixing Hubble. Many may think it wasn’t worth it – I am not one of them.
the same inability of handling numbers is why greece has riots and damage for killing one kid…
and stalin, mao, and others have apologists..
to kill one is a trajedy… to kill a million, a statistic.
our inability to comprehend the number, prevents us from engaging the level of true horror.
7-8 million in one winter starved to death…
the entire population of ny city gone by spring…
the problem is one of scale…
we live in a narrow band of perception.. where things that are too small are invisable… and things too large become invisable too… where things too fast and slow also do the same… most of our technology is only about expanding this…
the amazing large size of the universe is only surpased in incredible size, but knowing how small this universe goes too!
the universe, by near latest estimate is about 156 billion light years across.
1 light year = 5.87849981 é— 1012 miles = 5,878,625,373,183
so take 5,878,625,373,183 and multiply it by 156,000,000,000 and you get the width of the universe… (maybe – it migh actually be bigger… which might make the big bang a local effect).
the smallest distance though is also incredulby small, and arguable as to whether its the smallest.
that would be the planck length…
0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001 6 meters
you see… the universe only seems somwhat massive , because we ourselves are truly massive!!!!!
if you were to look at the complete span… the universe is 10s of magnitudes greater as a funciton of the smallest span…
if so then you have to convert that huge miles distance into meters… and then divide that by the plank distance to create a range from 1… and you would see a huge number that one cant comprehend…
ther are a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion atoms in the universe..
Just remember, there is no reason why we find these images beautiful except for tricks of our evolutionary genetic heritage. Ancestors of ours who found the universe beautiful were more likely to reproduce thereby passing down the traits to succeeding generations.
Just kidding.
The neat thing is that many of these objects are visible in small telescopes from your backyard. Obviously, they don’t look like the Hubble images, though.
I’ve seen the Sombrero Galaxy, M104. It’s small, fuzzy, and lacks the color and detail of the Hubble image, but the shape is unmistakable. And it was just plain cool to see it with my own eyes in my own telescope.
A lovely view of creation, truly awe inspiring.
The Hubble Telescope. Location; Not far enough from Teddy Kennedy
A quick word about the designation M104 I used in my last comment:
An 18th century French astronomer, Charles Messier, was an avid comet hunter. Faint comets look like small fuzzy patches in a telescope. They move and change appearance from night to night. Every now and then Messier would stumble across an object that he initially thought was a comet, but upon further observation he noticed that they kept the same appearance and stayed in the same spot.
So he compiled a list of objects for would-be comet hunters to avoid. He basically said, “I have no idea what these things are, but they aren’t comets, so don’t be fooled by them.”
To make a long story short, today we know that his list runs the gamut from galaxies to supernova remnants to star clusters to stellar nurseries. Messier’s list comprises the nearest and brightest examples of phenomena that can be found all over the universe, and pretty much all of them can be seen with small telescopes if you know where to look.
It really challenges the mind to ponder the implications of this: when you go out and view the stars from distant galaxies you are seeing photos flung from a moment in time farther back than the existence of man.
And yet we now know that the Universe is not infinite. It had a beginning. Yet the time and distance simply collapses our perspective of time. So, what IS time exactly if our experience of it cannot comprehend its distance from us?
If you want to get an idea of how these objects look in a small telescope, look at the pictures while squinting and defocusing your vision. That’s a pretty fair approximation.
Of course, that’s why we built the Hubble telescope: To see them clearer. 🙂
Remember to consider the speed of light. These photos, while breath taking, are moments in time, and are very old. If our sun burned out like a light bulb, or blew up like a hydrogen bomb, we wouldn’t know for about 8 & 1/2 minutes. The deeper out into space we are able to look, the further back in time we are able to go.
Sorry, FredHjr. I didn’t read your post before I sent mine. We have basically said the same thing twice.
Actually, some of the light gathered by Hubble and manifested in these and similar photos, is older than the dinosaurs.
Thank you Neo! Hubble is a wonderful, wonderful tool for exploration. I never get tired of seeing any of those pictures, or lose the feeling of awe and respect for all of creation. Rarely does hard science get the oppurtunity to mix with such beauty.
An interesting aside. I sent this link to many of my friends with the caveat to look at them and then tell me who really had the greatest light show this holiday season (meaning God). I was actually surprised at how many of them came back with a number of one of the pictures.
Hello Neo,
If you think these pictures are incredible, I think you would very much enjoy the DVD series called, “The Universe”. I understand almost all the images in this series were taken from Hubble, and it would seem that most of the images on the other end of that link you dropped were on the series as well.
Here’s a link to official site. There’re a Quicktime videos there as well. (Sheesh, I sound like a infomerical.)
Anyway, these images are just spectacular.
Hubble finds CO2 on exoplanet
[greenies go wild?]
http://www.rdmag.com/ShowPR.aspx?PUBCODE=014&ACCT=1400000101&ISSUE=0812&RELTYPE=CS&PRODCODE=00000000&PRODLETT=EO&CommonCount=0
The Jupiter-sized planet, called HD 189733b, is too hot for life. But new Hubble observations are a proof-of-concept demonstration that the basic chemistry for life can be measured on planets orbiting other stars. Organic compounds can also be a by-product of life processes and their detection on an Earth-like planet may someday provide the first evidence of life beyond Earth.
Previous observations of HD 189733b by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope found water vapor. Earlier this year Hubble found methane in the planet’s atmosphere.
“This is exciting because Hubble is allowing us to see molecules that probe the conditions, chemistry, and composition of atmospheres on other planets,” says first author Mark Swain of The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Thanks to Hubble we’re entering an era where we are rapidly going to expand the number of molecules we know about on other planets.”
These photos are awe inspiring. Does anyone know where or if you can buy prints to frame?