Posted on 09/26/2012 7:22:19 PM PDT by lbryce
Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe.
Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time.
The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.
Yeah, I'm not too crazy about phony ones either. Not a thing wrong with the rest though.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
...and it’s up to us to spread life throughout the Universe. If that’s the case then we hard better stop all this control-freak fighting amongst ourselves and get about our real work.
Wonderful statement. That's a beautiful thought, my friend. I highly doubt, though, that it's up to us to populate the galaxies. I happen to think that we'll never find a single one that's devoid of life.
“The future disappears into memory
With only a moment between.
Forever dwells in that moment
Hope is what remains to be seen.”
Recent lyrics from the band RUSH.
It is all so wondrous.
Heh....yeah, what the heck. Hold the mayo. I need a good burger after all this mind boggling ;-)
How about an image of Obama being born from some world 51 light years away. He’s currently 51 years old. If they can somehow manage to e-mail it to us instantaneously, we may be able to finally prove the case beyond a doubt.
One certainly cannot blame God for dropping any of the balls. Guess we can only blame ourselves. There is a whole solar system with more energy than mankind could ever use, and that energy is ignored because the technology does not currently exist to mine our solar system. Did God say, here is what is there, I gave you the technology to discover what I created? Go mine it, use it, relish it, be fruitful and multiply, and yet here we go and forget it? Wonder if this is part of our past, of which we have no knowledge? Has mankind been here before?
Home from Above Credit: Expedition 24 Crew, NASA Explanation: There's no place like home. Peering out of the windows of the International Space Station (ISS), astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson takes in the planet on which we were all born, and to which she would soon return. About 350 kilometers up, the ISS is high enough so that the Earth's horizon appears clearly curved. Astronaut Dyson's windows show some of Earth's complex clouds, in white, and life giving atmosphere and oceans, in blue. The space station orbits the Earth about once every 90 minutes. It is not difficult for people living below to look back toward the ISS. The ISS can frequently be seen as a bright point of light drifting overhead just after sunset. Telescopes can even resolve the overall structure of the space station. The above image was taken in late September from the ISS's Cupola window bay. Dr. Dyson is a lead vocalist in the band Max Q. Challenge: Can you identify which part of Earth is visible in the background?
And 0bama thinks he is in control?
ping
Yep. We home school, and my kids and I got onto that very subject a few weeks back. I think we lost track of all the potential directions and speeds before we even got to considering the Local Group. LOL
What's really interesting, is that the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way are headed toward collision (in billions of years). They're traveling toward each other at 250,000 miles an hour, and when they meet, scientists don't expect a single collision between their individual stars.
That's one helluva lotta space!
I heard that. What'll you have? Coors Light, or Heineken?
/johnny
Perhaps someday they'll find a way to communicate instantaneously. Maybe through Belle's Theorem/non-local/EPR/"spooky action at a distance"-type quantum communication. Then those distant aliens with snapshots of our past can send them to us immediately. :)
It’s a great big universe and we’re all really puny,
just tiny little specks about the size of Mickey Rooney.
In my fantasy world, the whole world at least agrees that God is Love, whatever else we may disagree about... in the unity that arises from that one simple realization, lets us work together well enough so that we do solve most of our societal ills and that we do populate the stars.
It’s a fantasy I have a lot.
That one really makes my head hurt.
If I compress the whole event into a humanoid scale, I can picture the individual particles momentarily speeding up in their initial flight away from the center, then eventually slowing down to the point where gravity overcomes their outward momentum. They then slowly come to a momentary point of stasis or equilibrium, then reverse course towards the center again.
That's the only scenario that makes sense to this puny human.
Oh, hell yeah! Tell 'em to take a right at Alpha Centauri, then head for the Pleiades! LOL
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