Wonders of the Universe - Brian Cox [22]
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Seven years behind schedule, shuttle mission STS-31 launched Hubble… A new eye was about to open and gaze at the pristine heavens…
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On 13 January 1994, NASA opened Hubble’s corrected eye to the Universe and opened the eyes of our planet to the extraordinary beauty of the cosmos. A decade late and costing around $6 billion dollars, it has proved to be worth every cent
The Hubble Space Telescope has brought us incredible images of other galaxies that we might never have been able to see. This shot of the spiral galaxy NGC1300 is one of the largest images taken by the telescope.
NASA
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is one of the most spectacular and important pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This image shows nearly 10,000 galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes and colours. The nearest galaxies appear larger and brighter, but there are also around one hundred galaxies here that appear as small red objects. These are the most remarkable features in this image; these are among the most distant objects we have ever seen.
NASA
HUBBLE’S MOST IMPORTANT IMAGE
For almost two decades the Hubble Space Telescope has captured the faintest lights and enabled us to rebuild these spectacular images, providing a window onto places billions of light years away and events that happened billions of years ago. These are places forever beyond our reach. However, there is one Hubble image that has done more than any other to reveal the scale, depth and beauty of our universe. Known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, this shot was taken over a period of eleven days between 24 September 2003 and 16 January 2004. During this period Hubble focused two of its cameras – the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer (NICMOS) – on a tiny piece of sky in the southern constellation, Fornax. This area of sky is so tiny that Hubble would have needed fifty such images to photograph the surface of the Moon.
From the surface of Earth this tiny piece of sky is almost completely black; there are virtually no visible stars within it, which is why it was chosen. By using its million-second shutter speed, though, Hubble was able to capture images of unimaginably faint, distant objects in the darkness. The dimmest objects in the image were formed by a single photon of light hitting Hubble’s camera sensors every minute. Almost every one of these points of light is a galaxy; each an island of hundreds of billions of stars, with over 10,000 galaxies visible. If you extend that over the entire sky, it means there are over 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, each containing hundreds of billions of suns.
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As we stare at Hubble’s masterpiece we are looking back in time; deep time, time beyond human comprehension…the Hubble Ultra Deep Field transports us back through the history of the Universe.
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However, there is something more remarkable about this image than mere scale, due to the slovenly nature of the speed of light compared to the distances between the galaxies. The thousands of galaxies captured by Hubble are all at different distances from Earth, making this image 3D in a very real sense. But the third dimension is not spatial, it is temporal. As we stare at Hubble’s masterpiece we are looking back in time; deep time, time beyond human comprehension. Just as an ice core leads us back through layer after layer of Earth’s history, so the Hubble Ultra Deep Field transports us back through the history of the Universe.
The photograph contains images of galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes and