I love looking up at the night sky and getting lost is the wonders of space. I’ve posted a stunning video looking at galaxies before.
Recently new photos and videos have been released by the people behind the Hubble Telescope showing the deepest views of a (tiny) section of the night sky.
Be prepared to have your mind blown!
The eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF photo was taken by combining over 2000 photos (with total exposure times of over two million seconds!) made on visits to the same small patch of space in the southern sky made over the last decade. They were taken with the Hubble telescope’s two primary cameras: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3.
“The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2009 (HUDF09) programme.
You can see a large version of the photo on the Hubble Telescope site.
Here’s a video ‘fly through’ of the photo showing the depth of the exposures – remember each one of the “blobs” in a deep field is a GALAXY!:
[Editor’s Note: I suggest listening to this while you watch the two following videos.]
[tentblogger-vimeo 50290914]
Now that’s a lot of galaxies – but the area it actually covers is TINY! It’s a 30 millionth of the whole sky (that’s a 30,000,000th!). But it shows about 5500 galaxies! Some are so distant that we’re seeing them when the universe was only at 5% of its current age!
If you can’t get your head around that number, then check out this video which scales back from the XDF:
[tentblogger-vimeo 50290915]
So if 5500 is an average number of galaxies for that size area of space, then all the sky would contain 165,000,000,000 (165 billion) galaxies – not stars but galaxies – with millions of stars within each galaxy (the milky way contains about 500 million stars)!
Is your mind blown yet?
Mine is!
You can find out more on the Hubble Telescope press release about the XDF.
[…] 3D visualisation of over 100,000 stars in our galaxy. In the past I’ve posted a couple of videos of incredible star-scapes – but this is done all in the browser – no video […]