“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” –Carl Sagan
And yet, we’re not alone, in that the Universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars in it, to keep us company. Thanks to the power of the world’s most advanced telescopes like Hubble, we’ve been able to observe point sources of light — stars and galaxies — many tens of billions of light years, to when the Universe was just 600 million years old. There ought to have been galaxies around even before that, just beyond the limits of Hubble’s wavelength range and ability to identify.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Bouwens and G. Illingworth (UC, Santa Cruz).
We will likely find them with the James Webb Space Telescope, but that’s not for a number of years. Yet we don’t have to wait! Thanks to looking at the extragalactic background of light, we can draw conclusions about how many distant galaxies there are beyond the power of Hubble to resolve them into sources, and at greater than 99% confidence, we’ve detected that there need to be at least tens of billions of them out beyond anything Hubble’s ever seen.
Image credit: Caltech, via http://ift.tt/1QK4ZxX.
It’s an amazing new discovery, hot off the presses. Find out about it today!
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1OACSC9
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” –Carl Sagan
And yet, we’re not alone, in that the Universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars in it, to keep us company. Thanks to the power of the world’s most advanced telescopes like Hubble, we’ve been able to observe point sources of light — stars and galaxies — many tens of billions of light years, to when the Universe was just 600 million years old. There ought to have been galaxies around even before that, just beyond the limits of Hubble’s wavelength range and ability to identify.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Bouwens and G. Illingworth (UC, Santa Cruz).
We will likely find them with the James Webb Space Telescope, but that’s not for a number of years. Yet we don’t have to wait! Thanks to looking at the extragalactic background of light, we can draw conclusions about how many distant galaxies there are beyond the power of Hubble to resolve them into sources, and at greater than 99% confidence, we’ve detected that there need to be at least tens of billions of them out beyond anything Hubble’s ever seen.
Image credit: Caltech, via http://ift.tt/1QK4ZxX.
It’s an amazing new discovery, hot off the presses. Find out about it today!
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1OACSC9
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