Contentment | Position movement Harmony of forces Situation at ease |
A
ll our nights should be spent playing out under the stars. Astronomers in 1996 pointed the Hubble telescope at a small fraction of the sky which seems utterly empty, a patch devoid of any planets, stars and galaxies. This area was near the big dipper, and the fragment was no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm's length. Over a ten day exposure, photons which had been traveling for over thirteen billion years were captured on the silicon detector. When the image was processed, the light from over 3000 galaxies, each one with 100's of billions of stars, was recorded on the sensor.
In 2004 using a more sophisticated sensor, with increased sensitivity and filtering techniques, they did it again. This time they pointed the telescope at a blank spot near the constellation Orion. Opening the shutter for eleven days and 400 complete orbits around the earth, they detected 10,000 galaxies in what has become known as the “Ultra Deep Field.” This image represents the farthest we have ever seen into the Universe. These galaxies are racing away from us, in some cases faster than the speed of light. The space time between us and everything else is growing larger by the minute, pushing these galaxies to over 47 billion light years away. Because of universal expansion, the farther away something is from us the more its light has shifted toward the red and the faster it appears to be moving. There are now over 100 billion galaxies recognized in the known Universe.
Mankind focused the most powerful telescope ever made at absolutely nothing, and discovered his minuscule place in the stunning immensity of space.
“Man is a piece of the universe made alive.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
