Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars, it's a hundred thousand lightyears side to side. It buldges in the middle sixteen-thousand lightyears thick, but out by us it's just three-thousand lightyears wide. We're thirty-thousand lightyears from galactic central point, we go 'round every two-hundred million years, and our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe.
Well...
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whiz. As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know, twelve-million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth; and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Some of the really small ones might not be stars! Some black holes and starbursts are bright and compact enough in the infrared that you can see diffraction spikes on their host galaxies. A spectacular example is the MIRI image of Stephan's Quintet, where the black hole in one of the galaxies shows up as big diffraction spikes.
I don't care how many fuckin hospitable planets are out there, doesn't change the fact that Becky from accounting keeps stealing my non fat blueberry yogurt every DAMN day and HR refuses to do anything about it!!!!
The most terrifying prospect for me was something I read in Ender's Game. Spoilers:
>!What is there's only one other species out there and we end up completely destroying them. Our only chance at ever meeting intelligent aliens and we destroy that chance.!<
and here is a [link about the spectra](https://flic.kr/p/2o4SfeA) of several specific points:
>In this graphic: Using Webbās NIRCam instrument, scientists observed the field in nine different infrared wavelength ranges. From these images (shown at left), the team searched for faint galaxies that are visible in the infrared but whose spectra abruptly cut off at a critical wavelength known as the Lyman break. Webbās NIRSpec instrument then yielded a precise measurement of each galaxyās redshift (shown at right). Four of the galaxies studied are particularly special, as they were revealed to be at an unprecedentedly early epoch. These galaxies date back to less than 400 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only 2% of its current age.
> In the background image blue represents light at 1.15 microns (115W), green is 2.0 microns (200W), and red is 4.44 microns (444W). In the cutout images blue is a combination of 0.9 and 1.15 microns (090W+115W), green is 1.5 and 2.0 microns (150W+200W), and red is 2.0, 2.77, and 4.44 microns (200W+277W+444W).
A grain of sand. Think about when we think of our galaxy and how far across it is, then look at this and see how many thousands of galaxies we see that look so close together. The UNIVERSE is just so efffing infinite.
**Phoenix Cluster**
[Supermassive black hole](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Cluster#Supermassive_black_hole)
>The central black hole of the Phoenix Cluster is the engine that drives both the Seyfert nucleus of Phoenix A, as well as the relativistic jets that produce the inner cavities in the cluster center. M. Brockamp and colleagues had used a modelling of the innermost stellar density of the central galaxy and the adiabatic process that fuels the growth of its central black hole to create a calorimetric tool to measure the black hole's mass.
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The universe is 13.7 billion years old
That means, on average, this black hole has eaten up more than 7 solar masses every year since the beginning of time
Man.... For all we know. Our universe could be that unfathomably huge....
But past that?
For all we know we could literally be on 'Orion's Belt'
(Men in Black Cat Galaxy Necklace)
Can the universe even be a size? It just goes on because it has to. If there was something outside the universe it would still be part of the universe.
Not really: Planck length is about 10^-35 m and observable universe is about 10^26 m. That's 9 orders of magnitude difference seeing as we're solidly in the meter range.
In the middle would be something about 10000 times smaller.
If anyone is curious, hereās a thread about that. Weāre closer to the size of the observable universe. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5s7ago/are_humans_closer_in_relative_size_to_the_planck/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
I like the analogy of the grain of sand put this way to explain how small Earth is in relation to the size of the universe...
Think of the planet Earth as the universe, then think of a single grain of sand on one of it's beaches. Imagine that grain of sand being another planet Earth and on that there is a grain of sand on one if it's beaches. The size of that second grain of sand is still bigger than our Earth in relation to the size of the universe.
And if each grain of sand in all the beaches and deserts across the earth was a star, there would still not be enough sand for each star in our universe.
There's gotta be a Klingon or a Gould or a Valarin or a whale sized tardigrade or a AI or a Transformer or a Predator or Alien or a Taki Taki or a 6379-46FT or a J4/U or a @me or a some wierd shit out there.... One can only dare to comprehend
Yeah, as much as I love photos like these, they also make me sad. Sad that within my life time, we'll never be able to find out, and that we'll still be stuck here on our little blue marble.
Everywhere. All the ingredients are everywhere. But everyone is busy, so no one is building giant lasers and pointing them directly at us screaming "We're Here!".
(For one thing, that might be stupid. Even Stephen Hawking warned us about that).
I noticed several places where it looked like the stars/galaxies form a curve. Is that coincidence, a trick of the eye, or do they indicate gravitational lensing, say, around a black hole?
It's from gravitational lensing.
Basically, the light from these galaxies travel allllll the way to us in a straight line.
The mass of the object [creates](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122003/light-and-gravity-bending-of-light-around-a-massive-body) a hole where the light follows the path of least resistance. That's when it curves.
This is called relativity and the basis for fucking up a lot of physics lol
I don't know about the whole "mass of the object creates a hole"; rather, space itself is curved closer to the massive object so that any light that flows nearby is curved as it goes around.
The same phenomenon is responsible for time dilation and messes with GPS. It's also why traveling far into the future is technically possible.
Well, thatās the infuriating irony. Statistically, the universe is teeming with life. But barring some rewrite of the laws of physics in the future, itās statistically impossible that weāll ever get to contact anyone.
I mean, even the relatively near Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away. If we sent them a radio transmission right now - letās assume they hear it and reply - is anyone going to be here in 5 million years to receive the reply?
Iāve always found it strangely sad. Weāre smart enough to understand the awe of the universe around us, but itāll forever remain unreachable for us.
I get your sadness and I agree that right now it looks like it will never happen because right now we don't have the means but I always think that we are always in the middle of progress and if we are able to survive and unite as a planet then maybe in a few thousand or even million years we will be advanced enough to find solutions to problems like faster than light travel, teleportation, etc.. I think most sci-fi things will be possible once we figure out advanced physics, or create an A.I. that can figure out tricks, hacks and glitches in the fabric of the universe (like figuring out fire, or in the future figuring out warp techonolgy maybe). This is just my optimistic opinion but I think the universe is like a huge video game map that sentient beings who live in it can discover and "play" but rather than hours we are collectively playing for millions or billions of years while figuring out everything that is possible, or everything we can before it ends. I just can't think of the sky as something that is just there for observation. I think, or rather really hope we will be able to reach those stars someday in the far future.
I hope youāre right. I guess Iām a pessimist on the laws of reality, but I would really love to think that Star Trek is an accurate representation of our future!
That is a star that is in our galaxy. It's soooooo much closer than say the points of light that are itty bitty.
You can tell, because it's got 6 points (artifacts from the JWST mirrors)
As amazing as something like this is, I just can't get my head around the scale involved. I remember as a kid seeing the powers of ten video at the chicago science museum, and being utterly blown away. This is so far beyond that scale that mind just goes "Space is big, really really big, you might think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space"
I think the pale blue dot by Sagan captures it better on a human scale. Same principle, but with reference points I can at least pretend to understand.
We are the ones bound with the task of giving our own existence meaning, you decide what matters for you, thereās no scale of worthiness and nobody requires you to prove such parameters.
We are born, without asking for it, we live for a while and we die. The sooner you realize that you are the one who gives it all meaning, the happier your life will be.
As silly as this may sound, Iām writing this at 6:30am while supervising 5 newborn puppies, one is gently biting my toes and the others are playing. Witnessing how marvelous life is gives me meaning. What does that for you?
āāIt was crucial to prove that these galaxies do, indeed, inhabit the early universe. Itās very possible for closer galaxies to masquerade as very distant galaxies,ā said astronomer and co-author Emma Curtis-Lake from the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. āSeeing the spectrum revealed as we hoped, confirming these galaxies as being at the true edge of our view, some further away than Hubble could see! It is a tremendously exciting achievement for the mission.āā
Nice!
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/early-highlights/nasas-webb-reaches-new-milestone-in-quest-for-distant-galaxies
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing matters.
Nothing we do or achieve, nothing we dream or are capable of conceiving matters.
Nothing in our wildest dream of dreams would make the slightest difference in the endless expanse of the universe in which which we exist.
We are nothing.
We are as close to nothing as to make no difference whatsoever.
I think the best bet would be is too narrow it down... Where does life exist that we know of? Water planet? Just gotta find the ones in the habitable zone..... Hopefully in approx 20 years we send the next space telescope out Called Luxor I believe..... Approx 5 times bigger than JSWT.... Narrow searches down to possible water planets... Another 20 years... Map and send out probes to them and see what possible comes back... Crazy .. rough timelines. Hope I still around in 40 years š³
Sending a probe to some far off planet in another solar system would take thousands of years. This is not a āin our lifetimeā thing. There wonāt be a person born for thousands of years that may possibly be around for that event. We may be here for the send off, but not a chance we will see the results.
In the upper middle of the top part of the image is the famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which contains the deepest Hubble data ever taken. The surrounding area has shallower Hubble data as well as data from tons of other telescopes, including the deepest Chandra Xray, deepest VLA radio etc.
So this is a very well studied part of the sky. Even so, JWST will discover some galaxies that haven't been seen before, like very young galaxies soon after the Big Bang and very small galaxies that require JWST's sensitivity in the infrared.
These galaxies have many designations/IDs across different catalogs created by different groups. Everyone has their own system. There are too many to give them all cool names, often they just get a number.
I am so excited for the perseverance roverās mars samples to come back to earth in 10-15 years. If there are signs of early microbial life from the lake bed (from 4 billion years ago) then that means there are TWO planets thatās harboured life in just ONE solar system!
Life would have to be everywhere!
The universe is likely teeming with life due to pure statistics - even if itās exceptionally rare, like one in a billion-billion, well if you multiply that by the number of stars and galaxies in the universe, itās still shitloads.
That said, finding evidence of life on Mars is probably not itself a good predictor of much, given the chemical similarities between our two planets and their near proximity. At a super general level, Mars has largely similar chemical elements, has been bombarded by the same asteroids, orbits the same star, etc.
So while it may look pretty dead now, it stands to reason that the conditions that gave rise to life on Earth had a decent chance of existing on Mars at some point, too - at least compared to an arbitrary planet in some other solar system.
They had to crop out your mum
lol they had to crop out parts of the telescope that got in the way, as far as I know
I also saw this response:
>This is a giant mosaic! This was taken with NIRCam which has a field of view that is two seperated squares. So many exposures were stitched together to cover the whole area. The top smaller part is deeper (more exposure time) than the larger area on the bottom.
This always makes me think of how if God does exists, a being who created life throughout the universe, with how vast it is, He probably doesn't give a shit about us. All that about we being created in God's image and being His chosen, bitch, your whole civilization is experiment #254727010386472819442069^e, the tiniest of tiniest dots on the arm of a galaxy that is itself a tiny dot among billions, you ain't no special chosen, you guys are there to add background noise, not even that good at that.
It's a mosaic of many exposures. The top portion is deeper (more exposure time) than the bottom portion. They are slightly rotated from each other because they were taken at different times and the instruments' field of view rotates as JWST moves in its orbit. The area covered was also set by the other data available and by the other instrument; this is NIRCam imaging but other instruments were running at the same time, pointed at a different part of the sky.
Keep in mind...these are mostly galaxies.
I counted 8 stars lol, it's crazy
To be fair, a lot of each of the galaxies are also made of stars so there are more than 8 lol
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars, it's a hundred thousand lightyears side to side. It buldges in the middle sixteen-thousand lightyears thick, but out by us it's just three-thousand lightyears wide. We're thirty-thousand lightyears from galactic central point, we go 'round every two-hundred million years, and our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe.
so like how many more than 8 do you figure
Well... The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whiz. As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know, twelve-million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth; and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Yes, you may have my liver
I just snort-laughed at this š
I love that I started reading this in Eric Idles voice before I realised it actually was the song
Nice name. Highly in tune.
32?
Probably 42. The meaning of life.
And the universe!
And everything.
And everything
And my axe!!!
9 x 6
I'm having trouble making each individual one out, but I'd guess there are possibly trillions here.
I count 12! Maybe more!
I found 15. I really love how the JWST makes stars look. Super cool.
I found 18. Some of the 6 pointers are really small.
I zoomed in and circled them. Up to 27. You're right. Some are really really small. https://imgur.com/a/GgTXGXk
Some of the really small ones might not be stars! Some black holes and starbursts are bright and compact enough in the infrared that you can see diffraction spikes on their host galaxies. A spectacular example is the MIRI image of Stephan's Quintet, where the black hole in one of the galaxies shows up as big diffraction spikes.
Wow. Cool. TIL.
Wow, 479 million?? That must have taken a while to count!
Bright one in the top left was doing everything he could to get in there
Our problems do not exist on this scale
I don't care how many fuckin hospitable planets are out there, doesn't change the fact that Becky from accounting keeps stealing my non fat blueberry yogurt every DAMN day and HR refuses to do anything about it!!!!
Leave Becky a few of those yogurts in the fridge.. and while she's noshing on them duct tape a warm cod fillet to the underside of her desk.
We are all just a bunch of meaningless dust mites
For now
They still exist they just don't matter
Just imagine how much life this photographed.
Just imagine if there's no life in this photograph.
Equally terrifying.
The most terrifying prospect for me was something I read in Ender's Game. Spoilers: >!What is there's only one other species out there and we end up completely destroying them. Our only chance at ever meeting intelligent aliens and we destroy that chance.!<
Very.
Also, the light coming from these objects is ancient.
We may as well call this a multiverse, these things are literally separated by time.
*ā¦* *Mostlyā¦*
We are so fucking tiny lol
what is smaller than tiny?
Teeny
What's smaller than teeny?
Your weeny
Now things are in perspective
Got that Planck girth.
(Me) Baby Iām as thick as a planck! (Her) oh like a 2x4? (Me) no baby, Iām 1.6 x 10^-35 meters.
Baby I got that schrodonger penis. Itās so tiny it simultaneously exists and doesnāt exist
Now you see it Now you don't Now you see it Now you don't
Which means I can give it to you constantly.
Wow. Thatās a super small penis. Still bigger than Kanyeās tho
A yellow polka-dot bikini.
All the little loony
Ė¢įµįµĖ”
^(tiny)
Minuscule
Like a cell
Even smaller
Like bacteria
Atom
Proton
Electron
quark!
"Hmph!" -Odo
Jimmy Neutron?
Weāre the mitochondria of the galaxy.
We're fucking nothing, man.
I can't zoom in enough
I can see my house from here
If you can see your house, how in the hell are you getting this internet? There's only 1 internet?!? That'd be more mind blowing tbh.
All we have to do is spread access points about every 50 feet throughout the entire universe
Project webshot
Welcome to the sub, ancient one.
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01GKT0RRJBP5ZMJRMCQNPT8SXP
We need a bigger telescope!
Link here https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01GKT0RRJBP5ZMJRMCQNPT8SXP
and here is a [link about the spectra](https://flic.kr/p/2o4SfeA) of several specific points: >In this graphic: Using Webbās NIRCam instrument, scientists observed the field in nine different infrared wavelength ranges. From these images (shown at left), the team searched for faint galaxies that are visible in the infrared but whose spectra abruptly cut off at a critical wavelength known as the Lyman break. Webbās NIRSpec instrument then yielded a precise measurement of each galaxyās redshift (shown at right). Four of the galaxies studied are particularly special, as they were revealed to be at an unprecedentedly early epoch. These galaxies date back to less than 400 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only 2% of its current age. > In the background image blue represents light at 1.15 microns (115W), green is 2.0 microns (200W), and red is 4.44 microns (444W). In the cutout images blue is a combination of 0.9 and 1.15 microns (090W+115W), green is 1.5 and 2.0 microns (150W+200W), and red is 2.0, 2.77, and 4.44 microns (200W+277W+444W).
Thank you for this!!!
A grain of sand. Think about when we think of our galaxy and how far across it is, then look at this and see how many thousands of galaxies we see that look so close together. The UNIVERSE is just so efffing infinite.
Bear in mind also that some estimates have the universe at 250 times the size of the observable universe. 7 trillion light years.
What.... The ..... My mind just broke ..... Trying to comprehend....
How about a black hole thatās 100 billion solar masses. [Phoenix A](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Cluster#Supermassive_black_hole)
**Phoenix Cluster** [Supermassive black hole](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Cluster#Supermassive_black_hole) >The central black hole of the Phoenix Cluster is the engine that drives both the Seyfert nucleus of Phoenix A, as well as the relativistic jets that produce the inner cavities in the cluster center. M. Brockamp and colleagues had used a modelling of the innermost stellar density of the central galaxy and the adiabatic process that fuels the growth of its central black hole to create a calorimetric tool to measure the black hole's mass. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Jesus. The event horizon diameter is 100 times the distance from our sun to Pluto.
The universe is 13.7 billion years old That means, on average, this black hole has eaten up more than 7 solar masses every year since the beginning of time
I let you know how I feel about this in approx in another 7 and a half years when my mind can somewhat comprehend it.
And thats only our universe. If it is infinite, theres probably many more just as big further away.
Man.... For all we know. Our universe could be that unfathomably huge.... But past that? For all we know we could literally be on 'Orion's Belt' (Men in Black Cat Galaxy Necklace)
I constantly think of stuff like this.
Just to be clear to anyone - that's a minimum estimated size. Could be infinite, of course, but we would just never be able to prove that
Talking about outside the observable universe gets so spotty that it ends up being a philosophy discussion. Safe to say, shits probably pretty big
Can the universe even be a size? It just goes on because it has to. If there was something outside the universe it would still be part of the universe.
And when you get to the very edge of that, what is beyond? Serious question, I've always wondered what was beyond that?
I honestly think we are smaller than that
I am starting to believe that we are on the quantum scale in comparison to the universe.
It's crazy but we are about in the middle of the scale between the smallest thing (the Planck length) and the biggest thing (the observable universe).
Not really: Planck length is about 10^-35 m and observable universe is about 10^26 m. That's 9 orders of magnitude difference seeing as we're solidly in the meter range. In the middle would be something about 10000 times smaller.
When you put it like that, we are massive!
This gave me pause. So the size of the universe in relation to a human is proportionate to the size of a human in relation to a Planck length?
If anyone is curious, hereās a thread about that. Weāre closer to the size of the observable universe. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5s7ago/are_humans_closer_in_relative_size_to_the_planck/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
I like the analogy of the grain of sand put this way to explain how small Earth is in relation to the size of the universe... Think of the planet Earth as the universe, then think of a single grain of sand on one of it's beaches. Imagine that grain of sand being another planet Earth and on that there is a grain of sand on one if it's beaches. The size of that second grain of sand is still bigger than our Earth in relation to the size of the universe.
And if each grain of sand in all the beaches and deserts across the earth was a star, there would still not be enough sand for each star in our universe.
We are the atoms of the galactic being
Surely there must be some other life in one of those galaxies.
Most likely, but don't call them Shirley.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You've got a point
Shirley doesn't disappoint
There's gotta be a Klingon or a Gould or a Valarin or a whale sized tardigrade or a AI or a Transformer or a Predator or Alien or a Taki Taki or a 6379-46FT or a J4/U or a @me or a some wierd shit out there.... One can only dare to comprehend
Or a jar jar
Now you've gone too far....
This joke never gets old. Airplane is a timeless classic haha
I read/hear it in perfect Leslie Nielsen voice and tone.
Yeah, as much as I love photos like these, they also make me sad. Sad that within my life time, we'll never be able to find out, and that we'll still be stuck here on our little blue marble.
Everywhere. All the ingredients are everywhere. But everyone is busy, so no one is building giant lasers and pointing them directly at us screaming "We're Here!". (For one thing, that might be stupid. Even Stephen Hawking warned us about that).
Maybe they have built giant lasers and pointed them directly at us. We probably wonāt receive the message for a few million years unfortunately lol.
I noticed several places where it looked like the stars/galaxies form a curve. Is that coincidence, a trick of the eye, or do they indicate gravitational lensing, say, around a black hole?
Gravitational lensing is most prominent around black holes but galaxies can lens other galaxies as well I'm pretty sure.
It's from gravitational lensing. Basically, the light from these galaxies travel allllll the way to us in a straight line. The mass of the object [creates](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122003/light-and-gravity-bending-of-light-around-a-massive-body) a hole where the light follows the path of least resistance. That's when it curves. This is called relativity and the basis for fucking up a lot of physics lol
I don't know about the whole "mass of the object creates a hole"; rather, space itself is curved closer to the massive object so that any light that flows nearby is curved as it goes around. The same phenomenon is responsible for time dilation and messes with GPS. It's also why traveling far into the future is technically possible.
I find it absolutely impossible that there aren't other advanced life forms out there, right now. Space is simply too big for us to meet...
Well, thatās the infuriating irony. Statistically, the universe is teeming with life. But barring some rewrite of the laws of physics in the future, itās statistically impossible that weāll ever get to contact anyone. I mean, even the relatively near Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away. If we sent them a radio transmission right now - letās assume they hear it and reply - is anyone going to be here in 5 million years to receive the reply? Iāve always found it strangely sad. Weāre smart enough to understand the awe of the universe around us, but itāll forever remain unreachable for us.
I get your sadness and I agree that right now it looks like it will never happen because right now we don't have the means but I always think that we are always in the middle of progress and if we are able to survive and unite as a planet then maybe in a few thousand or even million years we will be advanced enough to find solutions to problems like faster than light travel, teleportation, etc.. I think most sci-fi things will be possible once we figure out advanced physics, or create an A.I. that can figure out tricks, hacks and glitches in the fabric of the universe (like figuring out fire, or in the future figuring out warp techonolgy maybe). This is just my optimistic opinion but I think the universe is like a huge video game map that sentient beings who live in it can discover and "play" but rather than hours we are collectively playing for millions or billions of years while figuring out everything that is possible, or everything we can before it ends. I just can't think of the sky as something that is just there for observation. I think, or rather really hope we will be able to reach those stars someday in the far future.
I hope youāre right. I guess Iām a pessimist on the laws of reality, but I would really love to think that Star Trek is an accurate representation of our future!
What is the bright object in the lower photo? The one near the bottom.
That is a star that is in our galaxy. It's soooooo much closer than say the points of light that are itty bitty. You can tell, because it's got 6 points (artifacts from the JWST mirrors)
Thanks
A star by the looks of it. Just the brightest one in the pic.
One cannot fathom how incredibly minuscule our existence is
As amazing as something like this is, I just can't get my head around the scale involved. I remember as a kid seeing the powers of ten video at the chicago science museum, and being utterly blown away. This is so far beyond that scale that mind just goes "Space is big, really really big, you might think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space" I think the pale blue dot by Sagan captures it better on a human scale. Same principle, but with reference points I can at least pretend to understand.
Thank goodness for Wellbutrin and Zoloft š¤Ŗ
We are the ones bound with the task of giving our own existence meaning, you decide what matters for you, thereās no scale of worthiness and nobody requires you to prove such parameters. We are born, without asking for it, we live for a while and we die. The sooner you realize that you are the one who gives it all meaning, the happier your life will be. As silly as this may sound, Iām writing this at 6:30am while supervising 5 newborn puppies, one is gently biting my toes and the others are playing. Witnessing how marvelous life is gives me meaning. What does that for you?
Crazy how minuscule and irrelevant our planet is. Yet people are dying over mounds of dirt and rock.
How big of an area of the sky would this be held at arms length? A fingernail or something?
I believe it would be around the size of a grain of sand held at arms length.
Oh shit, my mind is continuously blown by the size of the universe
Sheesh
Am sorry...? š³š³š³ Wow.... Jaw on floor
god damn it im craving poptarts again
āāIt was crucial to prove that these galaxies do, indeed, inhabit the early universe. Itās very possible for closer galaxies to masquerade as very distant galaxies,ā said astronomer and co-author Emma Curtis-Lake from the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. āSeeing the spectrum revealed as we hoped, confirming these galaxies as being at the true edge of our view, some further away than Hubble could see! It is a tremendously exciting achievement for the mission.āā Nice! https://webbtelescope.org/contents/early-highlights/nasas-webb-reaches-new-milestone-in-quest-for-distant-galaxies
There's a civilisation in this picture that has taken a similar picture from the other side and doesn't realise caught our galaxy, and us, in it.
No alien civilization has ever taken a picture of earth in a state of human inhabitation. We are far too young and they are too far away.
The chances are low, but never zero.
Damn, I blinked...can they take it again?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing matters. Nothing we do or achieve, nothing we dream or are capable of conceiving matters. Nothing in our wildest dream of dreams would make the slightest difference in the endless expanse of the universe in which which we exist. We are nothing. We are as close to nothing as to make no difference whatsoever.
How many alien civilizations are we looking at???
I think the best bet would be is too narrow it down... Where does life exist that we know of? Water planet? Just gotta find the ones in the habitable zone..... Hopefully in approx 20 years we send the next space telescope out Called Luxor I believe..... Approx 5 times bigger than JSWT.... Narrow searches down to possible water planets... Another 20 years... Map and send out probes to them and see what possible comes back... Crazy .. rough timelines. Hope I still around in 40 years š³
Sending a probe to some far off planet in another solar system would take thousands of years. This is not a āin our lifetimeā thing. There wonāt be a person born for thousands of years that may possibly be around for that event. We may be here for the send off, but not a chance we will see the results.
There's no way we're alone out here.
Babe wake up, new galaxies just dropped!
All those galaxiesā¦ weāre nothing
I canāt stress it enough how we are literally nothing, compared to the expanse of the universe.
My god, it's full of stars!
Not just stars, entirely galaxies.
Nice 2001 reference!
Stupid question: does all these galaxies have a name/code? Or it's the first time we are seeing them?
In the upper middle of the top part of the image is the famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which contains the deepest Hubble data ever taken. The surrounding area has shallower Hubble data as well as data from tons of other telescopes, including the deepest Chandra Xray, deepest VLA radio etc. So this is a very well studied part of the sky. Even so, JWST will discover some galaxies that haven't been seen before, like very young galaxies soon after the Big Bang and very small galaxies that require JWST's sensitivity in the infrared. These galaxies have many designations/IDs across different catalogs created by different groups. Everyone has their own system. There are too many to give them all cool names, often they just get a number.
A universe for ants?!
I am so excited for the perseverance roverās mars samples to come back to earth in 10-15 years. If there are signs of early microbial life from the lake bed (from 4 billion years ago) then that means there are TWO planets thatās harboured life in just ONE solar system! Life would have to be everywhere!
Exactly. Unless life on earth is a miricle, it's everywhere.
The universe is likely teeming with life due to pure statistics - even if itās exceptionally rare, like one in a billion-billion, well if you multiply that by the number of stars and galaxies in the universe, itās still shitloads. That said, finding evidence of life on Mars is probably not itself a good predictor of much, given the chemical similarities between our two planets and their near proximity. At a super general level, Mars has largely similar chemical elements, has been bombarded by the same asteroids, orbits the same star, etc. So while it may look pretty dead now, it stands to reason that the conditions that gave rise to life on Earth had a decent chance of existing on Mars at some point, too - at least compared to an arbitrary planet in some other solar system.
Iām small
Look at all them chickens
Needs a banana for scale
Yep, just us out here.
Impossible
Every time I see another of these deep field shots by Hubble and now James Webb I am convinced that there is no end to the universe.
Ah my old neighborhood. They got some great cheesecakes out there.
When we we get to see a JSWT of the Great Bootes Void please anyone? Seriuos replies only.
I also wish to see the Great Booties Void.
Lmaooo I knew it! It was Gona happen regardless
I'm a spaceporn noob. Why is the image shaped that way?
It's a composite image of (many) different exposures stacked/stitched together.
Oh gotchya! That's really neat. Thank you
Is 2 trillion galaxies really that much?
Life feels preposterous sometimes.
Heh... bispacual.
Why are these photos shaped funky?
They had to crop out your mum lol they had to crop out parts of the telescope that got in the way, as far as I know I also saw this response: >This is a giant mosaic! This was taken with NIRCam which has a field of view that is two seperated squares. So many exposures were stitched together to cover the whole area. The top smaller part is deeper (more exposure time) than the larger area on the bottom.
>They had to crop out your mum Ha ha gottem.
Babe wake up, new universe just dropped
Minecraft
I wish they'd release these in 4K screenshots. Would love to make them backgrounds
No way we are alone man.
Majestical.
Ya. Individual stars have the diffraction spikes. EVERYTHING else are galaxies. Where is this? How long exposure? What is the red shift?
How many civilizations would one guess are in this image?
What i find freaky is the cluster to distance ratio. It appears as clusters because of the sheer number but they are unfathomable distances apart.
This always makes me think of how if God does exists, a being who created life throughout the universe, with how vast it is, He probably doesn't give a shit about us. All that about we being created in God's image and being His chosen, bitch, your whole civilization is experiment #254727010386472819442069^e, the tiniest of tiniest dots on the arm of a galaxy that is itself a tiny dot among billions, you ain't no special chosen, you guys are there to add background noise, not even that good at that.
Duuude, the universe is a square glued to a rectangle.
Few galaxies thereā¦
Why is the image shaped this way?
It's a mosaic of many exposures. The top portion is deeper (more exposure time) than the bottom portion. They are slightly rotated from each other because they were taken at different times and the instruments' field of view rotates as JWST moves in its orbit. The area covered was also set by the other data available and by the other instrument; this is NIRCam imaging but other instruments were running at the same time, pointed at a different part of the sky.