DescentBB

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegal ... e_142.html

it looks so cool
would make a good desktop background.

life not on this planet? debunk me religious zealots!!

wut?

anyway you can grab images all the way upto 130meg or so. i'm getting the sane 1.2meg one

staring into the mass.....

O_O


it's.. just.. so.. amazing..

this pic is just a tiny speck of our view from earth. and there are thousands of galaxies in just this pic, this tiny speck. each of these galaxies is probabaly as big as ours, and has billions of stars just like ours, and each star is probabaly surrounded by planets, just like in our SOL system.

O_O

that is just SOOO cool

i get first dibs on the cool planets ok?

it is amazing to think each one of those solar systems is hundreds of thousands of light years across...and you can see the faint, red-shifting galaxies in teh background...and you know that even more exist far beyond what hubble can pickup. it's so cool what a little gravitational lensing can do...not to mention what people can do building things like the hubble

Not to burst your bubble, but it's not a matter of "how far away they are" or "how many there are". What you see in the image is time, not distance. So looking back will always give you more and more galaxies because everything in the universe was closer together the closer you look into the big bang.

So any galaxy that appears some 13 billion years ago is probably dead today (but I don't know how long galaxies last).

...and you know that even more exist far beyond what hubble can pickup.

Only about 800 million years or so, which isn't a whole lot, but it would reveal a great deal about what the universe was like in it's beginnings.

yeah topher, but that 800 million years is the key. it IS the beginning of time. i know it's not distance, it's weird how that works. try explaining the system of time versus distance to a bunch of co workers...it's fun

Actually, its not really all that wierd. Remember that light only travels so fast (3x10^8 m/s), and travels a given ammount in a year. When you calculate how far away an object is at that moment when the picture is taken, you're really calculating where it was at that moment in time. Its really somewhere else today.

yes i know that MD....it's just incredibly cool. Pretty massive place we live in don't we??

It's not too different from lag -- you're getting a picture of where the ship was a few hundred milliseconds ago, not where it is now. We're just dealing with TRS-80 110-baud modem on AOL type lag with the planets. ;)

roid wrote:this pic is just a tiny speck of our view from earth. and there are thousands of galaxies in just this pic, this tiny speck. each of these galaxies is probabaly as big as ours, and has billions of stars just like ours, and each star is probabaly surrounded by planets, just like in our SOL system.

Actually, we only have proof of one solar system, and a few small clues of maybe a dozen others. (like a wiggling star and such)

i've heard otherwise meathead. as far as i know planets HAVE been found that are not part of our solar system. (actually, some have even been found just kinda hooning around the void of space, not orbiting anything).

i'll have to check my sourses (was it an astronomy mag?) as to HOW they found them, i think they watched wiggling stars until they finally started seeing silhouettes.

i'll get back ta ya on that

ok, in this mag here they are talking pictures that hubble took of extrasolar planets back in 1998. they think it's cool that they were slingshoted out of their host systems. so i guess planets orbiting around in their host systems in considered "normal". so yeah, we know of planets outside of our own solarsystem.

(woo now they are talking about the various missions that are currently studying these "other solar systems" planets looking for signs of life (methane, ozone, watervapour, blah) with spectographs).

When pondering how far away the galaxies in those pictures are, consider this. The light we see emitting from those galaxies travelling at the speed light does, took 13 billion years to get here. That's practically age of the Earth old. That's more years than it will take for our own sun to supernova old. That is a hella' long time.

I feel so insignificant.

Well, if you look from the christian POV, when He made the universe, he put more attention to us then the rest of the universe combined. I feel special when I look at and study the stars.