Saturday Science: "Long, Long Ago

in a galaxy far away. . . ."

Source: Hubblesite.org

How long? Maybe 12 billion years. Not long after the Big Bang. And how far away? I have no idea. But it's quite a distance. The image is from the Hubble Space Telescope, and uses gravity as a lense to magnify very faint, very distant galaxies.

"The Frontier Fields is an experiment; can we use Hubble's exquisite image quality and Einstein's theory of General Relativity to search for the first galaxies?" said Space Telescope Science Institute Director Matt Mountain. "With the other Great Observatories, we are undertaking an ambitious joint program to use galaxy clusters to explore the first billion years of the universe's history."

Simultaneous observations of this field are being done with NASA's two other Great Observatories, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The assembly of all this multispectral information is expected to provide new insights into the origin and evolution of galaxies and their accompanying black holes.

Somehow, I find it hard to think of myself as the center of the universe.