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Thursday, March 11, 2004

Meanwhile, in other galaxies

Check out the Ultra Deep Field, brought to you by the Hubble Space Telescope (via Sean Carroll).  And while you’re contemplating the mildly-hallucinatory phenomenon of (a) a big powerful telescope that’s not enveloped in this pesky atmosphere of ours (b) collecting, in a one-million-second (about 11-day) exposure, a few stray photons at a time (c) that have traveled roughly 76,440,000,000,000,000,000,000 -82,320,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles over the course of 13 or 14 billion years or so (that would be, hmm, about 13 or 14 billion light years), remind yourself-- if NASA stands by its recent decision to cancel servicing missions to the Hubble, the telescope will fail within a few years and may just come tumbling madly down to Earth in the next decade (don’t take my word for it, heavens no-- read this).  So never mind sending Neil Bush or James Lileks to Mars-- pleasant though the thought may be.  Let’s keep getting a good long look at these weird early galaxies instead.

Not least because Ultra Deep Field-gazing is perfect for when you’re grading papers.  More images here, here, here, and a whole slew of things here.

Posted by Michael on 03/11 at 07:50 AM
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