Why I Love Science…

Fri, 14 Aug 2009

My brother sent me a video this week of a 3D render of the galaxies imaged in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (wikipedia entry): a series of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2003 and 2004 that looks back approximately 13 billion years ago and images about 10,000 galaxies.

Not stars mind you. Galaxies. Each one possible of holding billions or trillions of star systems.

And this wasn’t through a big patch of the sky either, but in a tiny region of space the size of a square millimeter held a metre away from your eye. That leaves out 12.7 million single cubic millimetre patches of sky that possibly yields some similar results.

Like the following video says, all those figures are too huge of a figure to just compute in the human brain. And I’d agree.

I read of this image being taken some years ago, but it wasn’t till about a year ago when I stumbled across this image file that compares the scale of our solar system to that of the known universe and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field itself, that I had the pleasure of properly getting my brain’s nutsacks blown off.

It’s a big file (approx 1.5megs), so I’m not gonna post it here directly, but check it out and scroll through from the top and It’ll be sure to put some decent insignificance spice into your food for thought soup. Trivial things happen every day and our lives continually shift because of it, but with a little science, it’s pretty easy to put things into perspective of how tiny we all really are and blah, blah, blah, the existential thinking, just check out what I’m talking about here.

Anyway, going back to the original point of it, here’s the video and a full in depth examination article of the Ultra Field worth checking out here.