5/7/2002: Cool new Hubble image
 

http://cellar.org/2002/tad1.jpg

The Hubble's new camera has started to produce some fantastic images. This one (minus the red square) is "the Tadpole", galaxy UGC 10214. Its tail was created in a collision with another galaxy, which they say is the bright object in the upper left of the tadpole. I can't picture how the collision caused the tail, but the whole idea of colliding galaxies is mind-boggling enough.

Until you look a little closer at the image. You're used to seeing Hubble images with little specks of light in them. What you're not used to is seeing that, in this image, those little specks are GALAXIES.

What I've done here is to take the biggest TIFF image available from

here

and I've downloaded the 57MB image of the Tadpole. I selected out the area roughly in that red square, and sized it for a decent size to see here. The effect is to zoom in on that section:

http://cellar.org/2002/tad2.jpg

Even in the huge TIFF image, there isn't much to gain from "zooming" in further. The grain starts to blur what you're looking at.

Every one of those galaxies probably contains millions of stars. They believe there are about 6,000 visible in the shot. They believe some of them are extremely far away. How far? How does "the beginning of time" sound? 13 billion light years.

The mind boggles.

Here's a larger version of the Tadpole if you have the time or bandwidth to spare (156kb)

God went to a heck of trouble just to give our night sky pretty fairy lights!

Monty Python said it best..

My downlaods from that site are gonna top half a gig by the time i'mfinished
god i love virtaully upcapped cable.

I can just imagine some little kid on another planet, pointing to our sun and saying, "Look mommy! Look at that pretty star!"

It makes you feel all warm and smushy inside.


Alright, Im done now:D

wow
 

Let's see here:

A billion kazillion stars, many just like our own sun.

And some people still ask: "Could there be any intelligent life out there?"

Gee, I wonder...

Re: wow
 

I wonder - heck we haven't found any here:p

Inspiration
 

I keep a printed copy of a 1996 Hubble deep field image on the wall beside my monitor. It shows hundreds of galaxies of different shapes and colors. It reminds me just how big this place is and that the small stuff doesn't really matter when you look at the rest of the universe.

With these newer and better pictures, I may just put up a few more.

YA!
 

That image is SO cool.

They chose the most boring section of sky they could find, with nothing at all visible, and did this huge long exposure. They found hundreds of galaxies, in the space of what one book called a "period dot at arms length".

Wow.

If it's like that everywhere, and it probably is, the universe is truly incomprehendably huge. A human has no chance of understanding the distances and scale.

Re: 5/7/2002: Cool new Hubble image
 

The more I think about it, the more I feel that there can not be a "beginning of time". I can definitely see a "beginning of the universe as we know it", though.

Just because the universe didn't exist at one time, however, that doesn't mean that time didn't exist.

The way I think about it is this: think about time in the infinite future. Is time just going to "stop" one day? We'll all just freeze in place perhaps. That sounds kinda ridiculous to me. So, with that in mind, I figure the same view should be held for the past.

This isn't really very logical thinking, I know. I must come up with a more sound argument. :]

I just read a slashdot article on a cyclical universe. It's 14 billion years old now, but that's just the current expansion. Who knows how long it's been "big bang"ing and "big crunch"ing for.

In fact juju, since matter is energy, time may be an illusion!

Or something. I never read that Stephen Hawking book.

Amazing and beautiful. Oh, and I use my lack of matter/energy (need to stop and get coffee) plus the illusionary quality of time to rationalize my late slide into work each morning...

Presumably, several billion years ago, SOMETHING happened (big bang being the most popular theory).

Since space and time are indelibly linked (AFAIK, fourth dimension = time, spacetime and all that), then the beginning of the universe as we know it would have also been the beginning of time as we know it. If all of the matter in the universe was packed infinitely tighter than an atom, then something was almost definitely different with time as well.

thus, juju: if at some time in the distant past the universe did not exist, then I'd guess that time could not have existed either.

Ya, lots of fun philosophy in Hubble pics. But I'll stick to something simple that's been bothering me:

How can something appear 13 billion light years away, if the universe is only 15 billion years old? If it and us are on opposite sides of the center of the big bang, wouldn't we both have to be travelling nearly half the speed of light?

Who said we were on the edge of the universe? Of course, that implies you believe there is an edge!

To me, that's like saying what number equals infinity? :confused:

- 03#