this is the part that makes it weird. it's essentially a touched up photo which interprets non imageal data in image terms. not real essentially. looks impressive though.
I wouldn't say so. A lot of Hubble's pictures look impressive, as well as many pictures taken by the huge telescopes on earth. All those largely work in the visual range.
yeah it's still real in that sense. just the colours and extreme touch ups aren't real.
Full rez pic
And rather ironically it’s the sheer size and vastness that means we’ll probably never know if we are or not.
Yep. Also we'd never know if ET civilisations have been and gone in the last billions of years. It's scary.
13.5 billion × 9.46 trillion km = distance some of the galaxies in that image are. Mind blowing!
Unless humanity finds a way to dismantle and reconfigure the stringent principles of physics (as we interpret them), there are things that we just won't be able to do — no matter how long the time horizon from now, or the level of technological advancement. Looking at the Big Bang itself would be one of those things, because there's literally nothing to look at — at a certain point in the universe's history, you are confronted with an inaccessible curtain (and there's no way to peer through under the standard cosmological model). One day, we might be able to observe and map out the cosmic neutrino background (1 to 2 seconds after the Big Bang) or some of the earliest gravitational waves with impossibly massive and impossibly sensitive interferometers (and try to simulate a physical representation), but that is not going to happen anytime soon.
I was always told that the stars we see probably disappeared years ago, but we only see them now because of how far away they are and how long it takes light to travel. What's the truth in that?
And heading from that, what effect does looking through a super powerful telescope have on that? For example, they are a star in the sky and decide to lock in with their telescope to take a look. Is it still there when they look? Or are these telescopes not powerful enough in the grand scheme to make any difference to the aspect of time?
EDIT: I've gone back a page and seen this is actually already being discussed and that it is a big factor
So the universe is guessed 13.9 billion years old and in that time the big bang has managed to push enough material out into space for the universe to be 90 billion light years across, with an infinite amount of galaxies and stars, all the while black holes devouring up as much of it as they can. My tiny mind is incapable of understanding that. How can the big bang have done that. It must have been one hell of a bang to just explode all that out of nothingness.
The universe expands faster the further we observe and that acceleration is 70km/mpc. And I think a mega parsec is 3.2ly. So yea do lots of maths with that..
Now take the mindfeck to another level by trying to visualize all of that knowing the universe doesn’t really have a central point in space from which the Big Bang emanated even though we know it is expanding (*insert ‘mind blown’ gif).
Unless humanity finds a way to dismantle and reconfigure the stringent principles of physics (as we interpret them), there are things that we just won't be able to do — no matter how long the time horizon from now, or the level of technological advancement. Looking at the Big Bang itself would be one of those things, because there's literally nothing to look at — at a certain point in the universe's history, you are confronted with an inaccessible curtain (and there's no way to peer through under the standard cosmological model). One day, we might be able to observe and map out the cosmic neutrino background (1 to 2 seconds after the Big Bang) or some of the earliest gravitational waves with impossibly massive and impossibly sensitive interferometers (and try to simulate a physical representation), but that is not going to happen anytime soon.
Big Bang Time Line
Development of a Relic Neutrino Detection Experiment at PTOLEMY
Yea I know I was drunk
I had a canvass of the sombrero Galaxy, also can't wait to see my favourite hubble image of the horsehead nebula in infrared
Sounds like upgrading from a HD TV to a 4K TV.
Username checks out.
More likely in the stages of going to war with each other.
What happens if we expand into a Universe which has only Strange matter?
I always get reminded of Carl Sagans pale blue dot when looking at images of the vastness of space. So beautiful but also does reduce ones sense of worth
Really sad that we live in between the generations where we are aware of the wonders of space and can see them in detail, but don't have the technology to explore them yet. Wonder if one would rather live in ignorance of these wonders so you don't feel a sense of wanting to explore them, but know you can't.
