New Hubble Ultra Deep Field In Infrared 95
Hynee writes "Just in time for Christmas, HubbleSite has released a Hubble Ultra Deep Field redux. The original was in visible light; this version, five years on, is in infrared (1.05, 1.25 and 1.6 um).
The observation is in support of the upcoming JWST, which will observe exclusively in infrared, but the newly installed WFC3 does seem to provide some extra resolution over the 2004 visible observations with WFC2."
Way to make me feel tiny Hubble (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Way to make me feel tiny Hubble (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Billions and billions and billions...and BILLIONS and Billions....and... and...billions...'
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To put that into an easier perspective to visualize for people too lazy to check wikipedia before doing the calculations themselves, the width of the image is about 1/10th to 1/8th the diameter of the Moon seen from Earth (depending on when and where you are).
(Heh, captcha was "abstruse".)
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I don't think that makes things much easier...people have quite subjective perceptions when it comes to the size of Moon.
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I don't think that makes things much easier...people have quite subjective perceptions when it comes to the size of Moon.
Why would it be subjective? The width would appear to be the same to everyone who looks up at the moon, being 1/8 to 1/10 of the diameter. There is some guessing I suppose to figure out how small that would be, but it is more spatial recognition, nothing subjective... unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, as what you said was kind of subjective ;-)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_illusion [wikipedia.org]
You never noticed how the Moon appears much bigger when it's near the horizon? (when in reality it's slightly smaller then)
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Re:Way to make me feel tiny Hubble (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Way to make me feel tiny Hubble (Score:4, Funny)
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Pffff, the old fart decided to scatter billions of billions of stars throughout Universe and didn't give us even small another one in far-spaced binary system.
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You laugh but I told by a pastor once that I should consider the possibilty that all the stars in the sky at night are there because his god loves us to much and wanted to give us something truly beautiful to look at. He said it honestly, like it was what he actually believed. It was really quite sad, or disturbing, or both.
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arcsecond = 1/60 of a arcminute
milliarcsecond = 1/1000 arcsecond
microarcsecond = 1 x 10e-6 arcsecond
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So how many of these 11 arc-minutes squares are there in the sky? ...
Well, some quick math gives about 25.7 million of this size region to cover the entire sky. (assuming I didn't miss a decimal point
As far as number of galaxies in the photo, I'll leave that up to you to count. ;)
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So how many of these 11 arc-minutes squares are there in the sky? ...
Well, some quick math gives about 25.7 million of this size region to cover the entire sky. (assuming I didn't miss a decimal point
As far as number of galaxies in the photo, I'll leave that up to you to count. ;)
I think you may have missed a decimal point or several...
Assuming we take the night sky to be a hemisphere, it will span 2*Pi steradians in solid angle.
However one steradian is simply a square radian = (180/Pi)^2 degrees^2 = 3283 square degrees = 97670 (11 arcminutes)^2.
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Putting it all together means that the night sky will span about 614,000 of these 11-arcseond squares.
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And yet some people continue to cling to the belief that the only way that life can exist is if an invisible sky daddy created it.
Or worse, that our planet is the only one with intelligent life on it.
Even if an "invisible sky daddy" created life (directly or indirectly), why would he only do it on one planet, with so many trillions of other planets available to also experiment with?
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Adam and Eve had been busy all these years and they are currently on some far planet "experimenting". The Bible never mentioned it because it is written by human, and the light from that planet never got here yet.
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The new image is 2.4 arc-minutes wide according to hubblesite.org
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One arc minute is 1/60 of a degree of arc. The angular diameter of the full moon or the Sun as seen from Earth is about 30 arc minutes. This image would be about 1/12 the apparent size of the Sun or the full Moon as seen from Earth.
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I put the new one on top of the old one. XCF here [melikamp.com], you will need tar, bzip2, gimp.
I can definitely find a few places where the new image has a small spot, while the old one has dark background.
Alot of blue out there (Score:1)
Need Bigger Hubble! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Need Bigger Hubble! (Score:5, Interesting)
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The moral of the story is that if a handful of Bachelor's students can come up with a practical design concept in 9 months, there really is no reason that NASA, JPL, or, hell, even some commercial agency, couldn't set up a full telescope array on the dark side of the moon given proper funding and motivation. Then again, that's the kicker. Grades are great motivation for students. In the real world, someone has to fork over dollars, and people don't like doing that for science anymore....
Yep, money as usual
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I am all for a lunar base for many reasons, not just setting up a lunar base for a telescope, but what about having an array of dishes setup, where the moon would shield all that radio interference that our modern civilization makes?
Not to mention, I would love to see some futuristic mining and space ship building facilities there.
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the moon rotates around earth, so the "dark" side will get half time facing the sun also. you could go with a dark side dishes setup with satellite around moon setup.
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Well the 42m mirror E-ELT is coming up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Extremely_Large_Telescope
Too bad they cancelled the 100m OWL, it would have kicked ass http://www.gemini.edu/science/maxat/future/future.html
Besides, it had a much catchier name.
The're out there... (Score:1, Funny)
That is FUCKING AMAZING. (Score:5, Interesting)
That is truly amazing. I've been out of the field for about a decade now since retiring, but when I got my PhD in Astronomy in the 1960s, we never expected to have such fantastic photography of the celestial bodies. This is truly a tremendous accomplishment by all involved.
Re:That is FUCKING AMAZING. (Score:5, Informative)
How old does that make you? :-)
In any case, it is perhaps thanks to people like you that the field has advanced to such a degree when we can enjoy such mindbogglingly marvelous photos of the Universe.
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From the article:
"Infrared light is invisible and therefore does not have colors that can be perceived by the human eye. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium, and long, near-infrared wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; red, 1.6 microns). The representation is "natural" in that blue objects look blue and red objects look red. The faintest objects are about one-billionth as bright as can be seen with the naked eye."
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If these images are infrared as they supposedly claim, why can I see them? Humans can't see infrared.
I do hope you were trolling... that's the dumbest question I've heard in a long time. And I have teenagers... (I will show this to them, they will laugh...)
So, assuming it was a joke. Tres drole, tres drole. /golfclap
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If these images are infrared as they supposedly claim, why can I see them? Humans can't see infrared.
It's a trick to out the aliens. You posted AC, but we will find you. Now, for the rest, if you will please read the following text...
This post was caused by a static charge from a weather balloon igniting swamp gas.
Am I the only one... (Score:2, Funny)
Am I the only one that misread that as "Deep Fried" and expected a completely different kind of story?
Age of life (Score:1)
I guess that at an age of 600 million years there was no life yet in the universe. I wonder at what age life may first have existed, and at what age intelligent life could have evolved. One could imagine a series of 'life bubbles' outside of which no life (or intelligent life) is to be expected.
Ahem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ahem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ahem... (Score:5, Interesting)
To the extent that the observations and estimations of the galaxy's ages are accurate, yes it was enough time. Now they want to figure out how they formed more quickly than expected. If there is no reason to suspect that the observations and estimations are not accurate enough to rely on, then it must be our expectations of the time required for galaxy formation that is in need of revision.
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Probably all of it, actually. There was an article recently (here on /. I think, but I forget now) talking about a new theory which accounts for dark matter, and changes the "big bang" to something less explosive. Time will tell if this new theory becomes more accepted than the Big Bang theory, but I imagine that it won't be too long before it's overturned or revised, as most scientific theories are.
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You have a better theory that correlates with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation ? That predicts and matches its power spectral density to a fraction of a %, as well as its polarisation distribution? Great, let's hear it.
The truth is that the CMBR is a relic of the inflationary Big Bang. It's a Smoking Gun - almost literally. Look it up.
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Perhaps the universe started completely empty and gradually filled up our universe with energy, particles, creating space and time gradually. Perhaps the existance of space induces the creation of energy in our universe.
That may also explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. Since there is increasingly more space, energy gets created at an accelerated pace in our universe.
Energy can't appear out of nothing. That's why I say our universe. Conservation of energy demands "negati
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So basically, you dont beleive in a theory backed by a crapload of high quality observational evidence and replace it with a few sprinklings of "perhaps this, perhaps that".
damn....
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About the word "perhaps": the whole BB theory itself is a big "perhaps", especially as there are other explanations possible for the same observations. It's just that currently, the consensus is that the BB theory fits these observations the best.
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The observational "evidence" has required the BB theory to be refined frequently. In itself there's nothing wrong with refining a theory, but a theory having to be refined a lot starts to lose its credibility.
That's an irrational statement. In fact, it's rubbish. That's like saying that a marksman who practices a lot to become good loses his credibility as a marksman. Why? Because he wasn't 100% accurate first time and had to work at it?
Do you have any scientific training at all? Your reply seems to indicate that you don't. A "theory" is a framework that explains things. The more you know about the real world, the more you may have to adapt your theory to fit. Sometimes the theory cannot be further adapted - lik
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What I meant to say is that a theory that has to be constantly backfitted to match observations instead of predicting those observations loses credibility.
I'd love to see how the Big Bang theory fits observations that the universe is open (i.e., expanding at an accelerating pace). Oh yeah, of course, dark matter has been invented to backfit these observations... brilliant. Good luck with that!
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You seem to be describing the "Steady State Model" - something put forward by Hoyle in 1948 as an alternative to the Big Bang. Allow me to answer the CMBR question on your behalf - Hoyle suggested that in the Steady State Model the CMBR was due to radiation interactions with iron dust, giving a thermalisation.
When CMBR data became available - showing an almost perfect black body signature - the Steady State Model could not get better than a 10% or so match. Whereas the Big Bang model agreed to 1 part on 10^
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I think you have it backwards. The Big Bang theory was "refined" to match the observed distributions of the light elements.
If the observed distribution was in line with some previously established predictions that the BB theory brought forward, then it would have added significantly to the theory's credibility. Backfitting a theory to observed data hurts its credibility.
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I think you have it backwards. The Big Bang theory was "refined" to match the observed distributions of the light elements.
So fucking what? All science is based on revisions, refinements, adaptations, evolutions and revolutions. Somehow you think this denigrates a theory.
Big bang nucleosythesis was developed to explain the then observational data. The theory was a novel idea, a eureka moment for physics. It made numerous predications and follow-on work made even more.
Big bang nucleosythesis is good for explaining and predicting the abundances of 99% of the universe's baryonic matter. That's not bad. New measurements fit well w
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The Big Bang theory is based on the observations. To critique it, you must attack the reliability of the observations. Vague hand waving about philosophical doubts gets you nowhere. That's for church, not science.
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The observations led to the theory. Not only must your alternative theory explain the observations as well as the Big Bang theory does, it must also explain why the Big Bang theory appeared to explain the observations, even though it was incorrect. So you're wrong: it is all about the observations. It's always about the observations.
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In case of Big Bang theory, it's perhaps as close as you can get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBE#Black-body_curve_of_CMB [wikipedia.org]
Early observation only hinted at the Big Bang, were for a long time inconclusive/incomplete. First we had the theory with testable conclusions, only at some later point in time we were technically able to do the necessary observations. They confirmed those conclusions.
After xkcd:
Science: We finally figured out that you could separate fact from superstition by a completely radical method: observation. You can try things, measure them, and see how they work! Bitches. ... data from the COBE mission, which looked at the background microwave glow of the universe and found that it fit perfectly with the idea that the universe used to be really hot everywhere. This strongly reinforced the Big Bang theory and was one of the most dramatic examples of an experiment agreeing with a theory in history -- the data points fit perfectly, with error bars too small to draw on the graph. It's one of the most triumphant scientific results in history.
(emphasis mine)
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Tell that to the dark energy lunatics. ^^
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I doubt any of those spiral galaxies are 500 million years from the big bang.
Just about every object in the image has a different age. Several of the spiral galaxies you see are billions of years from the big bang. The 500 million years from big bang objects are more likely to be giant clouds of gasses and stars. The sort of stuff we didn't see with the visible light images taken in 2004, but that we can now see with the infrared filters used to make the new image.
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Do you have any evidence or detailed interpretation to support your assertion? Have you calculated a red-shift? Please share your calculations with us ....
You are not even looking at the raw data - just the adjusted images made available in press kits.
More life (Score:1)
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Interestingly, the Mormons, which are an offshoot of Christianity, do believe in life on other planets. They even believe that God (Jahweh) is an alien that lives on the planet Kolob, and is one of many such gods.
They probably don't talk openly about this very much with outsiders, just as Scientologists don't talk openly about Xenu and the Galactic Confederation, though it's central to their belief that Xenu brought billions of people here and killed them with atomic bombs to reduce overpopulation, and the
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It seems to me best to suggest that there might be aliens and there might not be.
You observation is very astute. May I suggest that you are either an ignorant Christian pedophile, or you are not.
But hold! You said "and" instead of "or"! You're thinking from a quantum mechanical perspective. My apologies, I think you're right. There are aliens, and there are not aliens, and it will not be decided until with observe them? Cool. But to them we're the aliens..... ah shit, let's just say they are 'angels'.
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Atheism is the rejection of dogmas, for it is the non-assertion of a delusional posi
Merry christmas (Score:2, Funny)
Just in time for Christmas,...
Deep fried in infrared, duh! this is just the neighbor's christmas tree!
It's not that big... (Score:3, Informative)
Comparison Between 2004 and 2009 Images (Score:5, Informative)
I took the 2004 UDF image and rotated/cropped as needed to match with the 2009 UDF image so you can switch between the two and compare the differences.
2004 UDF [imageshack.us] | 2009 UDF [imageshack.us]
The new image uses infrared versus the visible light filters from the 2004 image. The resolution may not differ much between the two images, but the infrared will pick up deeper objects that we missed with the visible light filters. However the visible light image tends to pick up more detail such as in the spiral galaxy in the middle-left. That galaxy is known as UDF 7556 and what you see is how it was 6.1 billion years after the big bang.
This stuff is so cool.
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Very cool. At first i was thinking, wow, the new one looks so washed out and gray. But the background on the new one is black.. just with so so many specks in it.. i'm simply amazed. Are those all galaxies? When i lean into the moniter and pick out one of those specks, is that a whole damn galaxy?
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Probably more than one, but yes, the big one in front hiding them all is a galaxy. :)
Anyone else (Score:1)
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I'm guessing that traversing these distances in any decent time is going to require rethinking our notions of how many dimensions the Universe has, and figuring out how to move between other, non-visible dimensions. As long as we're stuck in our current 3+time dimensions and saddled with the lightspeed limit, we might as well not bother going anywhere beyond Alpha Centauri.
Technical Corrections (Score:2)
(The diffraction limit of HST
UDF Infrared Lines (Score:1)
I took the extra large web image and decided to draw some lines to connect large (12 pixel or more), bright (50% luminous) objects together. The point was to try to find large regions of relatively dark sky in the image. Why? The original deep field images were taken upon "black" sky to see what really long exposures could find. Now with the ultra deep field images, it's plenty clear that most "black" sky has lots of galaxies visible. So, in the future, it'd probably be a good idea to take an ultra dee
deep field of the deep field? (Score:1)
Can they take a tiny part of the deep field image, that is (apparently) black, and do the same thing again?