Thursday, June 27, 2013
The Farthest Image of the Universe
Let's start with this one, which I think is the most profound image ever taken by humankind -- the deepest optical image (thus faintest and farthest) of the known universe, called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, compiled in 2012. The observable universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time, when they were young and forming. Thus the light captured in this photo travelled 13.2 billion years for us to decipher and marvel at.
This amazing photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a tiny patch of sky, as seen above in comparison to the visual size of the moon. This illustrates the enormous, mind-boggling entity that surrounds us and our tiny and humble presence within that universe, as there are more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe and each galaxy contains millions to trillions of stars. This picture is really worth "billions and billions of stars."
More info: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/xdf.html
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