Stephen Hawking looks back in time
To commemorate Stephen Hawking's exciting zero-g flight into near space today I thought I'd share some really cool shots he might see. (Although in reality he wont. Not only can he not turn his head to look out the window, but he'd need to be looking through the Hubble telescope at the time.) But anyway, here they are!
This artist's illustration shows an extrasolar planet orbiting very close to its host star. The planet designated HD 209458b, is about the size of Jupiter. Unlike Jupiter, the planet is so hot that its atmosphere is "puffed up." Starlight is heating the planet's atmosphere, causing hot gas to escape into space, like steam rising from a boiler.
This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the colorful "last hurrah" of a star like our Sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star's remaining core. Ultraviolet light from the dying star makes the material glow. The burned-out star, called a white dwarf, is the white dot in the center. Our Sun will eventually burn out and shroud itself with stellar debris, but not for another 5 billion years.
That's our Sun. You can look at this picture in 3-D here, although you'll need 3-D glasses.
And NASA is getting into the celebrations too!!
(Actually they're commemrating Hubble's 17th anniversary since its launch)
So they released one of the largest panaramic photos that Hubble's ever taken...
Please click the photo to embiggen into an incredibly huge, extremely high resolution version (7.3 MB) You can see so much detail, it's truly awe-inspiring. Also, if you're crazy, click here for the insane 200 MB and 480 MB versions. You'll fee like you're actually in space. Besides desktop wallpapers, people are having these professionally printed and mounted in sections on their walls to give you the illusion that you can peer right out into the universe through your windows.
And finally, the famously thought provoking Ultra Deep Field (UDF) image...
Hubble took over 800 exposures during 400 orbits around the Earth for this, each time focusing on the same dark patch of sky with varying focal lengths to produce an increasingly deep image. All those bright spots you're seeing are not stars, those are galaxies!! 10,000 real galaxies in this image alone. And this is not an artist's conception.
Without Hubble, at most, we can look up and see 2,500 stars in the sky, and all in our own galaxy. The closest extrasolar star being Alpha Centauri, which is "only" 4.35 light-years away. That means the light from Alpha Centauri took 4.35 years to get to our eyes. Which also means, the light is 4.35 years old by the time it gets to us, so we're seeing what the star looked like 4.35 years ago. We're looking back in time!
Now consider that our galaxy contains between 200 and 600 billion stars. And it's 70,000 to 100,000 light-years across, so the farthest star we can see in the Milky Way might actually be light from a hundred thousand years ago!
The closest and brightest galaxies we can see in the UDF image above are one billion light-years away. This image you're looking at right now is a snapshot of what those galaxies looked like one billion years ago. The furthest galaxies in the image existed 13 billion years ago, only 800 million years after the proposed beginning of time... the moment of creation.
An image like this really makes the Young-Earth theory's proponents look silly. If they take the Bible literally, all of this was created 6,000 years ago and God intentionally was deceptive. He would have had to create these far-off galaxies and all the light from them would have had to have been created as though it was already billions of light-years in progress on it's way to our eyes. Why would he have done that?
Obviously, Genesis doesn't outline 6 literal 24-hour days. These days account for Creation as it would have appeared from Earth. So the rest of the galaxies may have already been created before the vision began. And then each "day" may account for billions of years. The word "day" meant "era", as in "the day of Noah" which meant his "era". In fact, the whole creative week is referred to in the Bible as a "day". And the 7th "day" of creative-rest has not concluded, meaning we're still in that "day".
But isn't it amazing to travel back in time whenever we look up into the sky?
Anyway, have fun in space, Stephen! Maybe next time you can explore Mars!
FOLLOW-UP:
Posted by heydomsar
2007-04-26
go back | random brainstorm | go forth
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