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The Hubble Space Telescope has taken advantage of its beefed-up hardware to peer deep into the universe, spotting galaxies that existed just 600 million years or so after the big bang. In the image above, the faint, red objects are the most distant, but countless closer galaxies are discernible, as well.
The image comprises 48 hours of exposure time on Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), stretched out over a four-day period in August. In May, shuttle astronauts paid Hubble what will likely be its final visit by Earthlings, installing WFC3 and repairing or replacing a number of other instruments and parts. With the space shuttle scheduled for retirement next year and no replacement astronaut launcher at the ready, NASA's hope was to maximize the telescope's longevity and scientific usefulness, giving it another five to 10 years of operational life.
Hubble's ability to peer into the early cosmos and reveal what a typical slice of the universe looks like at depth has been a boon to astronomers for years. In 1996, the space telescope produced the so-called Hubble Deep Field image with WFC3's predecessor, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. And in 2004, another Hubble camera, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, took an even deeper look into the universe with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
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10 Comments
Add CommentThat is nice , now aim the hubble at the flag on the moon to shut those people up,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@warpsix:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou can't. The Hubble's diffraction limit prevents it.
Hubble _cannot_ see Tranquility Base because of Diffraction Limit
Formula for Diffraction Limit of a telescope:
Resolution=Distance*Wavelength/Aperature diameter
Resolution=400,000KM(roughly)*500nm/2.4M
Resolution=83.3 M or 80M if you want Significant Figures
Size of Tranquility Base artifacts: Much Smaller.
QED
ohhhhhhh Poppycock!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is possible that you may see a bright spots zone of spherical boundary where matter and antimatter anihilates to produce god particle or gravitoethertons as explained in my balloon inside balloon theory of twin cyclic universes of matter and antimatter on opposite entropy path.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI question whether most physicists really believe in their hearts that this whole vast universe once occupied a spacetime volume many orders of magnitude smaller than a single proton. Like Einstein I also doubt that anyone seriously believes in probability waves and he himself questioned the continuum basis of GR late in life. How can concepts of space and time derived from creation be raised to a priori status to explain creation? Yet this Big Bang thing is generally preached as gospel to a trusting public, perhaps due to the lack of an alternate pragmatic paradigm. Particle waves consistent with Plancks constant, de Broglies pilot wave and Bohms quantum potential open another door a crack that implies a discontinuous but synchronous universe. A different scenario necessarily emerges from the synchronous projection of atoms. See the website article Gravity, Quantum Relativity and System 3 at www.cosmic-mindreach.com for an alternate explanation of red-shift due to great distance alone and a related alternate approach to cosmology consistent with the evidence. There are alternate explanations for deep field observations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@weir - that website your promoting is non-sense. This guy is a chemical engineer with " many years of engineering and management experience in the Oil and Gas industries", this topic is out of his field of rigorous study and he only does so as a hobby. Yet he claims to have alternative answers to questions that much more brilliant minds than his have dedicated their lives to every day? I too am a chemical engineer with the same experience as he and also a burning passion about the greater questions of the universe. But I know better that unless you've done rigorous peer reviewed work anyone can sell books postulating anything as an alternative. And with a little scientific background you can throw around terms and ideas that would confound the uninformed. I wish pseudo-meta-science would stop trying to propose that real science done by real scientists are wrong and those with a half-ass understanding know all the real answers. In this day and age Ignorance seems to be in High Fashion!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisim with you evor! einstien was a patent clerk when he wrote all that half assed gibberish. yeah leave it to the real scientists i say
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAh, but Albert Einstein was a patent clerk with degrees in physics and mathematics, and his work was built upon earlier work done by other physicists and mathematicians. Even his own work was done in discussion and collaboration with other physicists and mathematicians!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHe was not some dark horse pseudoscientist, but was in fact a physicist.
@Weir: Yes, actually. All of the physicists whom I know do believe that the big bang took place, and that the states of particles are represented by their wave functions. They even believe that the squared modulus of the wave function is a probability distribution!
I suggest that you will find the answers to your questions if you pick up a physics text book and start reading. If you have any questions, then try asking a physicist.
life liberty and the pursuit of property was the original. why did they change it? cutthroats
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisall these hillbillies will not look into a telescope they are afraid they may see something they cannot describe, i guess. i live around people that think there are no dinosaurs no planets or anything that the government can make money on them with. their philosophy is: dont let them make money on you, spread the disease. i can relate to them cause it is really dark without all those telescopes and technology spoon fed to you. i can see the lights but my fellow mans ignorance wont let me bask in the warmth of those images of the past. if there were no dinosaurs or planets or such, dont you all scientists think it is time to tell us or devise a plan to co-exist with the same beliefs. as a speciesfunctioning as one organism it is the only way we marvel together yet alone we cause shame at what we could have done together.how do you create a new religion for everyone though? religare is a latin word meaning to bind or hold together. maybe i just dont have enough stimuli._ that is the secret_ to know you know nothing at all and numbness is the way to understanding hot and cold
@Evor Shub – As a chemical engineer yourself without experience as a practicing physicist or rigorous study your comments to discredit me reflect on yourself. Your words come across with a kind of religious fervor. You do not know me, you are not familiar with my work and you are in no position to judge me thus. Throughout my working career I have taken long sabbaticals to study the physical and biological sciences and their philosophical underpinnings in great depth. It is more than a hobby as you put it. The peer review process may be necessary to maintain a certain level of scientific discipline but it also requires conformance to a fixed scientific methodology in the western paradigm with roots going back to Aristotle’s efficient cause. A scientist of the stature of Fred Hoyle could not get his work on the Panspermia theory of Arrhenius published and had to turn to the popular press. My work is not a pseudo-science. It is an alternate methodology that requires direct confirmation with the empirical evidence. It can complement the vast fund of empirical knowledge that traditional approaches to the sciences have accumulated over the last few centuries. It is a strict discipline. Pseudo sciences are not. Many in the academic community recognize a need for a new paradigm. This cannot come from within the current thinking of the scientific community. I am in personal contact with practicing scientists including physicists who do not believe in the Big Bang and many who work on it question it, as they should. Otherwise it is just a mindless religion. QM and GR have never been reconciled and yet both are used in Big Bang cosmology. With the development of QM a split was introduced between the practice and interpretation of physics. The practice of physics employs meta-language that is based on how the language of physics has come to be used. Although the Copenhagen interpretation is used as default in conducting experiments under contrived circumstances any number of interpretations are possible from the same results, and there are quite a few. The Bohm Interpretation is equally consistent with experimental results and does not rely on probability waves. Matter waves are something distinct. My work is reasonably consistent with his. The website article Unified Theories, Fantasy & Cosmic Order was published in the 2008 ANPA (philosophy of physics) proceedings at Cambridge.
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