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When Hubble stared at nothing for 100 hours (2015)
- fmakunbound 6y agoThis and the later XDF (eXtreme Deep Field) surveys still raise the hairs on the back of my neck every time I look at them. It really puts our human scale and importance in perspective.
- coldcode 6y agoIt's hard to imagine that the tiniest pixel spec of a galaxy hold hundreds of millions or more of stars like our own which might have planets with people on them. Of course they might also be 12B years gone.
- dghughes 6y ago> It really puts our human scale and importance in perspective. Speaking of scale a new large structure was discovered a supercluster which has been named "South Pole Wall" it;s 1.5 billion light years in length. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnUUKJMAmFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnUUKJMAmFo
- machello13 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Wall for anyone else who prefers reading to watching videos.
- dghughes 6y agoAnton the channel owner puts links to papers relating to what he is discussing. The paper he linked to is not very long: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab9952 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab9952
- caiobegotti 6y agoThis almost makes me dizzy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#/media/File:XDF-scale.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#/media... (it's a picture of the night sky showing what exactly Hubble was imaging with the Moon for scale) I never really understood how XDF is only that tiny patch of the sky and yet it has a godzillion of galaxies inside it!
- ctdonath 6y agoTIL: Moon covers 0.5°.
- brianpan 6y agoThe Sun- also 0.5°
- alejohausner 6y agoWow, they're both the same size! What a cool coincidence! Just think what would happen if the moon passed exactly in front of the sun! Has it ever happened? Has anybody looked up at the sky when this happened? I wonder what it looks like.
- nojvek 6y agoYeah full solar eclipses are a lot of fun. I had an experience in Seattle a couple of years ago. They perfectly align and all you see is a thin ring from the sun flares. In that perfect eclipse, you can look at the sun with the naked eye and it’s beautiful and humbling. Like the day suddenly turns into a night for a few minutes. The TV series “Heroes” was all about this eclipse. It’s a fun show if you enjoy this kind of things.
- titzer 6y agoI witnessed the 2017 total solar eclipse in person. Very eery feeling. It's worth noting that you should still not look at the sun during a total eclipse as the corona is still bright enough to do damage, and your pupils are dilated.
- MengerSponge 6y agoIf you haven't yet, you should read Vonnegut's short story "The Euphio Question", which was written well in advance of deep field, but is eerily complementary.
- Ma8ee 6y agoJust imagining the interstellar space does it for me. Our planet is a marble in a cathedral compared to the solar system, and between stars not even a speck of sand.
- guerrilla 6y agoI don't know of anything more awesome (in the literal sense of the word) than these photos. It makes my wonder just how densely packed (ignoring variation in distance) the area is. What will we see when we start looking between those dark spots? What if there's literally something in every direction...
- gizmo686 6y agoBefore our modern understanding of cosmology, a serious question astromers asked is "why is the night sky dark". If there truly were stars/galaxies in every direction you would expect the entire night sky to be bright, as no matter which way you looked you would see a star; and the combined light of all of those stars should illuminate the sky. As it turns out, empty space isn't dark, but rather illuminated by the cosmic microwave background. This suggests that the space between us and this boundary in space from when photons started to be able to move mostly freely is mostly empty. Otherwise this backround would either be over-shadowed by stars, or obscured by whatever stuff was obscuring said stars. Of course, it is important to keep in mind the speed of light implications.
- philiplu 6y agoFor more on this, see Olbers’ paradox - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox
- drran 6y agoBut, Hubble demonstrates that every line of sight is actually ends on surface of a star or an object, so what is your point?
- gizmo686 6y agoWhen did Hubble demonstrate that? What the experiment in the article showed is that seemingly empty regions contained stars. If you want to claim that every 1 dimensional line of sight ends on an object, then you need to explain how the cosmic microwave background manages to reach us. Unless, of course, you count quark-gluon plasma as an object; in which case we do pretty much hit a wall in every direction.
- nabilhat 6y ago> In 1995, astronomer Bob Williams wanted to point the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of sky filled with absolutely nothing remarkable. For 100 hours. It was a terrible idea, his colleagues told him, and a waste of valuable telescope time. People would kill for that amount of time with the sharpest tool in the shed And by 'Bob Williams', we mean the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble. Williams chose to use some of the predefined Director's Discretionary Time to explore the limits of the telescope and our understanding of the universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(astronomer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(astronomer)
- JamesLeonis 6y agoI adore these images, and deeply respect the reputation risk in getting them. I also believe that even if we found nothing at all, it would still advance our understanding of the universe as we could confidently say what limits there might be.
- stingraycharles 6y agoUnfortunately people would not have gotten nearly as excited when seeing nothing, and the nay-sayers would have made this very clear. These things are always as much science as they are politics, so the reputation damage would have been real.
- JamesLeonis 6y agoWhile I agree with you about PR and reputation (sadly), it would be valuable for scientists as a Null value. I would put it on the same level as the Aether experiments.
- stingraycharles 6y agoYes the point I tried to make was explicitly about the political aspects. I agree that from a scientific point of view, the null value is almost as valuable as what we got now.
- joncp 6y agoFor me, those images are a sliver of the Total Perspective Vortex. The more I try to comprehend them the more blown away I am by them.
- brutt 6y agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolman_surface_brightness_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolman_surface_brightness_test
- doctoboggan 6y agoI remember the first time I saw the deep field image. It blew my mind then and still does today. I had no idea it was a controversial experiment at the time.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoI have a sense that the article is presenting things in a more dramatic way than how it really occurred: > So, with his job perhaps on the line, Williams went off, put together a small team of post-docs, and did exactly as he’d planned. For 100 hours, between Dec. 18 and 28, Hubble stared at a patch of sky near the Big Dipper’s handle that was only about 1/30th as wide as the full moon. In total, the telescope took 342 pictures of the region, each of which was exposed for between 25 and 45 minutes. The images were processed and combined, then colored, and 17 days later, released to the public. I mean, each image was only exposed for 25-45 minutes. If the full hundred hours was such a huge risk, why not take, like, 5-10 photos first to see if you get much of anything? Seems like they would have been able to know pretty early on whether it was going to be worth it.
- ISL 6y agoI'm sure they did start stacking as soon as they got the images. From a statistical perspective, 100 hr is roughly 3x better than 10 hr.
- spenczar5 6y agoIf they found nothing in the first 5-10 images, what do you imagine they would do? Telescope scheduling is a very tricky business, not one that lets you change courses too quickly.
- MiroF 6y agoSchedule the 5-10 mins, then schedule again for later.
- barkingcat 6y agoThe amount of programming and orbital changes needed for this is not feasible. For the hubble to point at something, I'd imagine it needed to station-keep and burn some hydrazine. If you did infinite numbers of 5-10 min studies, you'd burn right out of the fuel store of a spacecraft before you'd get anything done. From what I hear, hubble telescope times are scoped out, planned out a year or several years in advance - the telescopes and scientific instruments need to be programmed, the spacecraft needed to be moved/pivoted to aim at the right part of space, communications times needs to be booked with receivers/ground stations across the entire Deep Space Network so you can receive the data. It's nontrivial - if you booked 5-10 min at a time you'd have wasted your most precious resource. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
- gen3 6y agoThe sheer scale on these photos is amazing. Seeing galaxies strewn around like marbles is very humbling. I hope there are more plans for deep space photos. I wonder what a telescope on the other side of the moon could capture.
- ISL 6y agoI'm sure it is on the list for JWST. I suspect Spitzer must have already attempted the same thing. Being on the other side of the Moon, alone, isn't likely to make a huge difference in image depth.
- gwern 6y agoAnd frightening. Such photos really bring home the Great Silence. All of those specks which are entire galaxies, and not the single slightest sign of intelligent life anywhere, ever. The marbles roll on just as they have for billions and billions of years and will go on rolling for billions to come, dead pieces of inert matter tracing out their gravitational trajectories and burning as predicted.
- myself248 6y agoCould I say that it's also hopeful in a way, that nobody more violent than us seems to have emerged?
- krapp 6y ago>All of those specks which are entire galaxies, and not the single slightest sign of intelligent life anywhere, ever. You say that as if we could tell with any certainty, at that scale. There could be interstellar civilizations spanning several of those galaxies and uncountable intelligent civilizations that simply never pursued space travel or the constant accelerated curve of energy consumption and colonization we assume they would, only because we ourselves would. We wouldn't know, we don't even really know what we're looking for, and the universe is so vast that even if we did, we'd be all but certain to blink and miss it.
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- nickgrosvenor 6y agoBest article I've read in a long long time.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> For 100 hours, between Dec. 18 and 28, Hubble stared at a patch of sky near the Big Dipper’s handle that was only about 1/30th as wide as the full moon. In total, the telescope took 342 pictures of the region, each of which was exposed for between 25 and 45 minutes. How did this work? 342 pictures at 25 minutes each is already well over 100 hours. At 45 minutes, it'd be 256 hours.
- ISL 6y agoIndeed, the math doesn't pencil out. I don't know, but I'd hazard a guess that the image is 100 hr deep on multiple tiles. The dataset spans 10 days, which is 240 hr.
- MiguelHudnandez 6y agoThe telescope's orbital period and the relative positions of the earth and the sun will affect how the exposures are scheduled. I went looking for more detailed information -- It appears they are open enough with the data that you can see exactly how the exposures were taken. Assuming what I found is right and that someone could make sense of the data. There are postscript files listing activity for each of the 10 days, but I am not exactly sure what we're looking at. https://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/project/project.html https://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/project/project.html
- Darkphibre 6y agoHere you go: https://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/project/scheduling.html https://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/project/scheduling.htm... Observations run from 352:16 to 362:19. Filter Nexp hours F300W 100 48.93 F450W 62 36.52 F606W 77 34.94 F814W 49 34.86
- azernik 6y agoPossibly counting images using different sensors as separate exposures, even if they're taken during overlapping time intervals
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- annoyingnoob 6y agoHa! I just ordered a custom skate deck with these images on the bottom.
- iliaznk 6y agoI'm sorry, I haven't read the article, maybe it's explained there, but as far as I understand by 100 hours they mean that the telescope was sitting there for 100 hours exposed open like a camera, right? How come the image is so sharp then? Wouldn't all those galaxies be constantly moving and end up blurred in a photo?
- pryelluw 6y agoFrom the article: ...In total, the telescope took 342 pictures of the region, each of which was exposed for between 25 and 45 minutes. The images were processed and combined, then colored, and 17 days later, released to the public.
- iliaznk 6y agoOh, that explains it, thanks a lot!
- ben_w 6y agoHubble is in space. They just pointed it somewhere and said “don’t move” (well, multiple times and stacked, but the effect is the same). The galaxies themselves are so far away their own motion is way less than a single pixel.
- short_sells_poo 6y ago"Bob was right, I was wrong. The use of that discretionary time was a courageous thing," This is such a powerful statement from Rob Kirschner. It is science at it's best. Someone (rightfully) opposing an experiment, being incorrect and admitting, without reluctance, shame or regrets that they were wrong. At the time, Bob's idea was by all available information questionable. But it was right for him to persevere, it was right that he had to face and overcome opposition and it is right that the opposition gracefully admits that Bob was right :)
- ape4 6y ago"Bob was right" would be a good framed reminder
- cmroanirgo 6y agoAs an Aussie, this hilariously augments a phrase used commonly here: "Bob's your uncle" (meaning roughly: "and there it is" / "and there you have it") Even more hilariously, I have an uncle Bob.
- quickthrower2 6y agoAlso used in the UK. Bob can be an auntie too.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
- elboru 6y agoProbably it’s a perspective issue, but galaxies look relatively close to each other, is that the case? I mean they look relatively close compared to their size, in contrast our solar system’s bodies are really far away from each other (of course relatively).
- tempestn 6y agoRemember it's 3d; they're not arranged on a single plane.
- nabla9 6y agoAverage distance between galaxies is 10-100 times the diameter of the average galaxies. Andromeda for naked eye is a smudge six time bigger than the moon (3.0 degrees across).
- depressedpanda 6y agoI found it hard to believe that Andromeda would be six times larger in the night sky than the moon, so I searched online and discovered this article showing what the galaxy would look like if it were brighter: https://petapixel.com/2014/12/08/photos-night-sky-look-like-andromeda-galaxy-brighter/ https://petapixel.com/2014/12/08/photos-night-sky-look-like-... Wow. TIL.
- Ono-Sendai 6y agoYou can see it with the naked eye in a very dark place. It looks like a big brighter smudged area, a little off the plane of the milky way. And it does appear a lot bigger than the moon.
- Ma8ee 6y agoThey are. Stars are of the order of thousands of star-diameters apart from each other, while galaxies are of the order tens of galaxy-diameters apart.
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- baxtr 6y ago> “With this achievement, the estimated number of galaxies in the universe had multiplied enormously — to 50 billion, five times more than previously expected,” This numbers is sheer incredible. Each of them contains 50 billion stars. How come some think we’re alone in this universe? EDIT: yeah, I know speed of light and all... it’s just a stupid fantasy that is fueled by these numbers
- pixl97 6y agoWell they are so far away we are for all practical reasons, alone. Suns will be born, die, reform from the ashes many times before a message at the speed of light could make a round trip. And that is to the ones at only a few billion light years away.
- zhengyi13 6y agoI just had this thought that, say, in prison, or a bad relationship, there could be a person in the room right next to yours, and there could be such a gulf between you that you are in fact completely and utterly alone. ... If there's no communication between you, what else would you call that but "alone"? Edit: I should say that I think I hear what you're saying, and I further think that there's always hope that you could bridge that gap.
- Ma8ee 6y agoI have this nagging thought that maybe intelligent life really is a coincidence of a grand cosmic scale. Maybe we really really are all alone in this galaxy and among many others. What an incredible opportunity we are given, and how we squander it with our bickering.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoLol, would love to know the thought process of someone that bothered to downvote you. if you don’t believe aliens exist, you are wronggggg!!!
- Ma8ee 6y ago
- whoisjuan 6y agohttp://archive.is/5cgaD http://archive.is/5cgaD
- archon810 6y agoThank you. It's incredibly obnoxious when a website says I have 3 free articles left to read this month and 10s later pops up a non-dismissable pop-up that forces registration.
- dmalvarado 6y agoSince we seem to have a good discussion here, there's something I've always wanted to know. If I understand correctly, the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. As is mentioned frequently when staring at deep space, we are looking at the universe not as it is, but as it was, since it takes so long for the light to travel to us. Some objects in the Hubble Deep Field are over 9 billion years old, and some within 1 billion years of the beginning of the universe. My question, as best I am able to ask it, is assuming the big bang theory is true, how can it be that we on Earth can be looking at something simultaneously so old and so far away? If everything originated from the same point, how can it be that we pick an object in the sky and say "that is what the object looked like 12 billion years ago"? Doesn't it beg the question, "well then where were we 12 billion years ago?" As in, how can we be here, observing something close to the beginning of time? Didn't both objects start at the same place? I hope that makes sense.. Articles and videos much appreciated
- grumple 6y agohttps://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/if-the-universe-is-13-8-billion-years-old-how-can-we-see-46-billion-light-years-away-db45212a1cd3 https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/if-the-universe-is-13-...
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- 4gotunameagain 6y agoImagine that it is the 17th century. We are both in London, and you tell me that you will be in Mumbai in six months. The same night, I write a letter to you, addressed to Mumbai. Six months later, both you and the letter arrive, and by opening it you are exposed to my mindset as it was six months ago. Hope that helped a little bit..
- wdbbdw 6y agoI won't pretend to understand the answer well enough to give a clear answer. Instead I'll highly recommend an illustrated version of Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time to dig deeper into this question. I personally find that big questions like this really do require more than an article or video.
- szymonsidor 6y agoI stared at nothing. I stared at absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be.
- aaroninsf 6y agoCurious how strongly apparent size correlates to youth. I am guessing that especially in the extreme deep field, the distant couple-pixel dots correspond to the back of the room i.e. the oldest/most distant galaxies, so this is in some real if crude sense looking through a core sample of cosmological time?
- Waterluvian 6y agoIt seems counter to the fundamentals of science culture that the director just kind of gets 10% of the time without need for approval. Can anyone cast some light on this?
- learnstats2 6y agoI thought this was an interesting part of the article that wasn't fully explained - how this was negotiated. There is some explanation for Director's Discretionary's purpose here in the Call for Proposals (although given that this Deep Field project seems now unlikely to qualify, this might have been retconned): https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20080527200338/http://www.stsci.edu/hst/proposing/documents/cp/cp.pdf https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20080527200338/http://www...
- munificent 6y agoYou can look at it as the process of becoming director is itself approval for those kind of discetionary choices. When an organization works well, it entrusts power to those who have the judgement to use it well. If someone needs to get ten different kinds of approvals, are they really a "director" for most meaningful senses of the word?
- walrus01 6y agoI can't imagine you become director of the hubble telescope without having a significant, long-running track record of astronomical science behind you. The odds of such a person picking something interesting to observe are high.
- jaquers 6y agoGet around "sign up if you wanna read" modal w/ window.bc.jQuery.fancybox.close(); jQuery('.fancybox-lock,body,html').css({overflow:'scroll'})
- beastman82 6y agohow do I use this
- samcal 6y agoWe learned new words for things. The decade changed. The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time, The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is— So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back. - excerpt from Tracy K. Smith's "My God, It's Full of Stars" [1] Smith's father worked on the Hubble telescope, and she would be named US Poet Laureate in 2017. I highly recommend reading her poetic account of this photograph :) [1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55519/my-god-its-full-of-stars https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55519/my-god-its-full...
- aaron695 6y agoSo Bob was right, because Bob was right. Good learning opportunity here. We shouldn't think to hard whether he was right or why though.
- tigen 6y ago“With this achievement, the estimated number of galaxies in the universe had multiplied enormously — to 50 billion, five times more than previously expected,” It seems that current estimates for this are higher, such as 100 billion in a 2020 article I saw. Anyone have an authoritative scientific source for the best current estimates? 50 billion galaxies (or 100) somehow doesn't actually seem so many. Considering that's on the same scale as the number of people on our tiny space rock. Yes each one has billions of stars inside, but still, we're talking about the entire universe. Somehow, intuition suggests there must be more "stuff" beyond our observable universe.
- keithnz 6y agoI agree.... here's https://phys.org/news/2017-01-universe-trillion-galaxies.html https://phys.org/news/2017-01-universe-trillion-galaxies.htm... where it's 2 trillion. Which is 1 galaxy for every dollar in the US Coronovirus stimulus package or 256 galaxies per person. Which makes it also feel like an approachable number for the amount of galaxies in the universe.
- kiloreven 6y agoI find it really sweet that the author of the article illustrates the perspective of our place in the universe as her father is known for just the same rhing :D
- suzzer99 6y agoI've had a framed poster of the Hubble Deep Field on my wall since the late 90s. I see it every day when I wake up. It's the only wall-art I own that I know I'll never swap out for something else.
- johnnymonster 6y agoPaywall links need to be downvoted
- noisy_boy 6y agoI was looking at the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field photo and in there locked on a galaxy that was just a dot and imagined that out of the billions of stars and trillions of planets in that dot, there could be life on a planet with a variety and richness and vast history that is unfathomable to us. Us and them, two dots unbelievably far away yet parallelly flowing through time. I think the only reason Space doesn't generate a lot more interest than it draws now is because it is truly mind boggling.
- MichaelMoser123 6y agoWill you reach a limit if you come up with a telescope ten times as big - where is the real limit? Is that an exciting question? I think there is a bit of rhetorics involved at interpeting the result of this experiment.
- vlasev 6y agoYou can pretty much make a telescope as large as you'd like, depending on your technological level. Hypothetically, you can use gravitational lensing to make a telescope via the sun! It's rather unfeasible at our current level of rocketry, but in time, maybe! Article: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/using-the-sun-as-a-cosmic-telescope/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/using-the-... You can also use Earth's atmosphere as a lens too! It's an amazing video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgOTZe07eHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgOTZe07eHA Going even crazier, I can imagine we could some day use a massive black hole as a giant telescope.
- nojvek 6y agoIsn’t it great the the starlink junk doesn’t photobomb Hubble? It’s amazing we have a giant telescope outside the planet. We know so much about the universe because of Hubble and friends. When I was young I truly believed in heaven and hell as some distant planets. Then learning about Hubble, cosmic radiation and the fact that we can see millions of lightyears away which is an incomprehensible distance and the fact that our vision is limited by speed of light that seems super slow relative to those distances. I really had a paradigm shift. Heaven and hell are probably good ideas but don’t actually physically exist. Took me a while to digest that. If they were actually there, we’d have seen them by now. I have a lot of respect for Astronomy.
- vlasev 6y agoJust a nitpick: Hubble is at a much higher altitude than Starlink and as such would never be interfered with.
- ngcc_hk 6y agoSuch a brave soul.