The Hubble Deep Field: Most Important Image Ever Taken

GOD defiles Reason · Sophomore Joined: 25 Aug 2005 Posts: 283 Gender:

The Hubble Deep Field: Most Important Image Ever Taken (short video)

Chris OConnor

I'm watching it now. I hope this isn't a joke. Already one part of the video has a kid throwing his arms up in the air on a web cam acting like a fool. It will suck to have wasted all this time watching and it not be genuine.

Chris OConnor

Awesome video. ::80

funda62

Very cool!

Funda

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, prehaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

-Henry David Thoreau

Rich206

"We live on a planet, one of eight in our Solar System....we'll miss you Pluto"

Poor Pluto

...you'll always be a planet to me.

I did like the video, although I could have done without the "Numa, Numa" guy.

Thinker102 · Eligible to vote! Joined: 08 Nov 2006 Posts: 13 Gender:

Hmmm...

`Seventy Eight billion light years'...

That doesn't seem quite right to me. Age of the universe is supposed to be on the order of 12 billion lightyears, give or take a billion or two. So...even if our galaxy and these distant ones in the deep field were moving apart from a common point at near light speed, the *actual* distance by now should be no more than 22-28 billion lightyears, and the observed separation should be only half that. Maybe the distance involved is `only' 7.8 billion lightyears?

(now, I might have misheard - my beast don't handle these flicks all that well, and my speaker ... is not the best).

A couple years ago, as a ...personal project... I worked on something of relevance to this and other astronomy related threads here.

Chris OConnor

Quote:
I might have misheard

Actually, you didn't. This is something that has always confused me, but the size of the universe is much larger than the 14 billion years we assign as it's age.

From Wikipedia

Quote:
Very little is known about the size of the universe. It may be trillions of light years across, or even infinite in size. A 2003 paper [4] claims to establish a lower bound of 24 gigaparsecs (78 billion light years) on the size of the universe, but there is no reason to believe that this bound is anywhere near tight. See Shape of the Universe for more information.

The observable (or visible) universe, consisting of all locations that could have affected us since the Big Bang given the finite speed of light, is certainly finite. The comoving distance to the edge of the visible universe is about 46.5 billion light years in all directions from the earth; thus the visible universe may be thought of as a perfect sphere with the earth at its center and a diameter of about 93 billion light years. Note that many sources, including previous versions of this Wikipedia article, have reported a wide variety of incorrect figures for the size of the visible universe, ranging from 13.7 to 180 billion light years. See Observable universe for a list of incorrect figures published in the popular press with explanations of each

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Thinker102 · Eligible to vote! Joined: 08 Nov 2006 Posts: 13 Gender:

Well, the only real out I can see here involves the very early stages of the formation of the universe, before the current ...laws of nature... for want of a better term were solidly established. Unless relativistic law is being violated somehow, which opens the field to some sort of eventual `hyperdrive', but that be ... doubtful, to put it mildly.

Still...in the course of my other project, I did run across mention of some catalogued stars with ages ranging as high as 17 billion years. (I believe, based on my other readings, that this had to do with a systemic error in the techniques used to determine stellar age. The corrected versions were a bit better than half that).


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