"78 Billion": Journey to the Beginning of Time -A Hubble VIDEO

It helps to put things in perspective here on our frenetic little planet with a look at this extraordinarily powerful and moving video of the Hubble Space Telescope mapping of the Universe, whose known size is 78 billion light years across.

The video of the images is the equivalent of using a "time machine" to look into the past to witness the early formation of galaxies, perhaps less than one billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang.

The video includes mankind's deepest, most detailed optical view of the universe called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF). One of the stunning images was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) for ten consecutive days.

Representing a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime located 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution.

Most of the galaxies are so faint (nearly 30th magnitude or about four-billion times fainter than can be seen by the human eye) they have never before been seen by even the largest telescopes. Some fraction of the galaxies in this menagerie probably date back to nearly the beginning of the universe.

"The variety of galaxies we see is amazing. In time these Hubble data could turn out to be the double helix of galaxy formation. We are clearly seeing some of the galaxies as they were more than ten billion years ago, in the process of formation," said Robert Williams, Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute Baltimore, Maryland. "As the images have come up on our screens, we have not been able to keep from wondering if we might somehow be seeing our own origins in all of this."

Essentially a narrow, deep "core sample" of sky, the HDF is analogous to a geologic core sample of the Earth's crust. Just as a terrestrial core sample is a history of events which took place as Earth's surface evolved, the HDF image contains information about the universe at many different stages in time. Unlike a geologic sample though, it is not clear what galaxies are nearby and therefore old, and what fraction are very distant and therefore existed when the universe was newborn. "It's like looking down a long tube and seeing all the galaxies along that line of sight. They're all stacked up against one another in this picture and the challenge now is to disentangle them," said Mark Dickinson of the HDF team.

Nearly a year of preparation preceded the observation. The HDF team selected a piece of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper (part of the northern circumpolar constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear). The field is far from the plane of our Galaxy and so is "uncluttered" of nearby objects, such as foreground stars. The field provides a "peephole" out of the galaxy that allows for a clear view all the way to the horizon of the universe.

78 Billion Video

Selected and posted by the Galaxy editorial team.

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Google “Sky”—New Virtual Telescope Using NASA Hubble Images Plans to Turn Millions into Stargazers
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http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/01/text/

Comments

[bob]

if big bang started 14 billion years ago,
we'd expect universe to be 28 billion light
years across tops. so how come 78?

[rick386]

So, if the stuff we're seeing is 78 bilion light yrs away, then it's 78 billion yrs older than what we see of it. It could be assumed that some of what we see, no longer exists. A lot could change in just a few years, no?

[flflake]

Just another blunder by a proofreader? 8:)

[maudyfish]

Why is there a limit on the age because of how far "we" can see?

[frenk]

I love the Hubble I watched an program today about the Hubble for 5 hours. I was amazed.

[coskunlar vinc]

yes. Why is there a limit on the age because of how far "we" can see?

[James Dean]

Wow, I think you hit that nail on the head dude!

RT
www.anonymity.ru.tc

[Sam]

Hubble found that light from distant galaxies is 'redshifted', meaning the wavelength is longer than it should be. This is because space has expanded, stretching the light waves. The universe is expanding, so distant galaxies appear to be moving away from us. By calculating how quickly the universe is expanding, we can work backwards to estimate when it was all in the same place (the big bang), giving us an idea of the age of the universe.
It also means that, although the light we see from distant galaxies might have been emitted 13 billion years ago, as space has expanded the galaxies are now much further away, perhaps 39 billion light years away, so the universe that we can see is something like 78 billion light years across. The universe as a whole is probably infinitely large, we just can't see it.

[Wm. L. Adams Jr.]

Recently I started enumerating as many kinds of objects as I can (generically, such as galaxies, stars, mountains, cells, quarks, etc.) when meditating on all God's creations. One thing that occurred to me is, as wide as our world is, it is closer to being one of the smallest objects in the universe than one of the largest; this may be true even of the sun.

[Gordon]

They say the universe is <>14 billion light years old. BUT...If I look out with an imaginary telescope at a point in the sky and claim that the 'edge'is <> 14 billion light years away, but then turn around 180 degrees and look out again in exactly the opposite direction, suppose I decide that it's still <> 14 billion light years away in that direction. If light took 14 billion light years from my first view, then I must ADD another 14 billion light years from my second view to my total; thus <> 28 billion light years !!! Get it? I'm in the middle of all this and I'm just looking left and right. If light from one side of the universe (point A) were to travel across to the other side, it would pass me at the 14 billion light year mark, and keep going on to point B. Total: <> 28.
Argument number two: Scientists are only allowed to publish what they can PROVE...not what they surmise. I think our equipment simply cannot see any further out because of the limitations of that equipment. Any takers?