Wednesday, June 05, 2002
Humbled by Hubble
If you're ever in need of something to make you feel humble or, alternatively, like an insignificant speck of dust on the whole cosmic scale, there's nothing that will do the job quite like a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. In particular, check out this visual spectrum photograph of the
Tadpole Galaxy. The Tadpole is the wispy one in the middle of the image, being stretched out by the massive spiral galaxy (don't know the name) in the upper left. But to feel really humbled, check out this quote from Space.com:
But in the background was an important surprise. Roughly 6,000 galaxies were detected at various stages of evolution stretching back 13 billion years in time, nearly twice as many distant galaxies as detected earlier during the 1995 Hubble Deep Field project, the most comprehensive survey Hubble ever completed.
Six thousand galaxies. Astronomers estimate the Milky Way has 100 billion stars. Assuming that we live in a fairly average galaxy, in this one HST photo we have just stumbled 600 trillion acrosspreviously unknown stars. How many of them have a planetary system? How many might harbor life? Just how gigantic is this universe anyway?
# posted by Eric @ 3:02 PM 
