Mostly Mute Monday: Out Of The Darkness (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” –Edgar Allan Poe

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we’ve learned for a certainty that the black abyss of empty space isn’t really so empty. Far beyond what we can perceive with our naked eye (or even ground-based telescopes), galaxies exist and go on for tens of billions of light years.

Image credit: Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO, via http://ift.tt/1ebxw10.

So what do we see if we take an area almost a third the size of the full Moon — far larger than any of the Hubble deep fields — and view it from the ultraviolet through the visible and into the infrared, capable of seeing objects 250,000,000 times fainter than our naked eye can see?

Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, M. Mechtley, and M. Rutkowski (Arizona State University, Tempe), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia), P. McCarthy (Carnegie Observatories), N. Hathi (University of California, Riverside), R. Ryan (University of California, Davis), H. Yan (Ohio State University), and A. Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute).

Come find out, in spectacular pictures and a few words, on today’s Mostly Mute Monday!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1CSfuwD

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” –Edgar Allan Poe

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we’ve learned for a certainty that the black abyss of empty space isn’t really so empty. Far beyond what we can perceive with our naked eye (or even ground-based telescopes), galaxies exist and go on for tens of billions of light years.

Image credit: Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO, via http://ift.tt/1ebxw10.

So what do we see if we take an area almost a third the size of the full Moon — far larger than any of the Hubble deep fields — and view it from the ultraviolet through the visible and into the infrared, capable of seeing objects 250,000,000 times fainter than our naked eye can see?

Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, M. Mechtley, and M. Rutkowski (Arizona State University, Tempe), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia), P. McCarthy (Carnegie Observatories), N. Hathi (University of California, Riverside), R. Ryan (University of California, Davis), H. Yan (Ohio State University), and A. Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute).

Come find out, in spectacular pictures and a few words, on today’s Mostly Mute Monday!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1CSfuwD