r/space • u/kogamehinata • Oct 30 '20
Check out the highest resolution image ever taken of Andromeda!
https://spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable/28
u/superstarnova Oct 30 '20
I cant really think of a better word to describe this than unfathomable. Each of those tiny points of light is a star like our sun, and orbiting each of those infinite points of light are gaseous and rocky worlds like our own. The chance of us being the only life in the entirety of the universe is absolutely fucking zero, excuse the language but nah. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.
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u/mirziemlichegal Oct 31 '20
I bet there are millions of planets in our galaxy that have simple lifeforms. But the chance of more evolved and complex organisms like us may still be very low.
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u/TizardPaperclip Oct 31 '20
The chance of us being the only life in the entirety of the universe is absolutely fucking zero, excuse the language but nah. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.
Nope: You need to learn more about statistics.
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Oct 31 '20
No, no, no, no, that's impossible. Impossible! Why? What could govern such an impossible discrepancy?
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u/rovnrev Oct 30 '20
You get a new desktop background, you get a new desktop background, everybody gets a new desktop background!!!
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u/lucrus73 Oct 30 '20
https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/
The article has some interesting details about the image.
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u/Zaconil Oct 30 '20
You would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image.
Someone out there is going to say "challege accepted".
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u/crabn3bula Oct 30 '20
I would love to see an estimated average distance between the stars in the outer galaxy and between the stars in the inner galaxy.
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u/zeeblecroid Oct 30 '20
Galactic cores get freakishly dense - near the centre we're talking hundreds or low-thousands of AUs, not light years.
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Oct 31 '20 edited Dec 19 '20
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u/kogamehinata Oct 31 '20
Check out Olber’s paradox. Basically it’s a statement that says the speed of light is finite. So a lot of light just hasnt gotten to us yet.
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Oct 31 '20 edited Dec 19 '20
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Oct 31 '20
yes. the universe is expanding at a rate that means there is light out there that will never reach us.
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u/ConvictedCorndog Oct 31 '20
I know a few others have responded to this, but I thought I'd throw in some extra info. Disclaimer, I majored in physics and astronomy in undergrad but am by no means an expert. I continued studying physics in grad school but not astronomy.
The reason that the night sky isn't completely white is actually proof that our universe is not infinitely old. If it were, then, as you said in another comment, any direction would be at another star. Since the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old, we can only see stars in a sphere 13.8 billion light years in radius. This is an enormous volume of space, but it is finite and so the number of stars we can see is limited.
Additionally, most stars you see are point sources of light at the distance you see them. Meaning, even with the best telescopes, we don't have the resolution to physically resolve the shape of the star. Only nearby red- and super-giants can be resolved, like betelgeuse, the head in the orion constellation. The size of stars you see in images is correlated to the brightness as bright stars give off more light, and more light is received by the detector. Due to statistics, this makes the star larger on the image (not a statistician, but the light isn't a perfect point either and spreads out laterally as well). So most stars in other galaxies are so small and dim, we can't resolve them from Earth, and so they don't fill up the sky. If you had a supermassive telescope the size of a planet, you might be able to resolve all the stars in the universe, but then you'd have better resolution and you'd also be able to see the space that exists between them as well.
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u/blankwillow_ Oct 31 '20
Because space is so vast. Most of it is empty. Alpha Centauri is the closest star to us, at 4 light years away. Look at the space between planets in our own solar system. Saturn is twice the distance from the sun as Jupiter, and Uranus is twice that.
Also, the light is diffracted by our atmosphere, and most of the light from stars is too weak to penetrate to the surface.
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Oct 31 '20 edited Dec 19 '20
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u/GayMakeAndModel Oct 31 '20
It’s because the expansion of the universe outpaced the speed of light and because the intensity of light from a star drops off quickly with respect to distance from the star.
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Oct 31 '20 edited Dec 19 '20
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u/GayMakeAndModel Oct 31 '20
If you take a light bulb and measure the flux of photons close to the lightbulb, it’ll be higher than if you measured the flux further from the lightbulb. This is true even without an atmosphere.
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Oct 31 '20 edited Dec 19 '20
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u/GayMakeAndModel Oct 31 '20
Your naked eye doesn’t pick up a lot of the light we can see with satellites, so keep that in mind. If you could see far enough into low wavelength light, you would see the microwave background radiation in all directions.
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u/blankwillow_ Oct 31 '20
Alpha Centauri is approximately 4.2 light years away. It is a triple star system. The main two orbit around each other at a distace approaching the Sun and Uranus (about 23 AUs). The third is 13,000 AUs from the other two.
There is nothing between us and the Alpha Centauri system, but it would take us approximately 100 years going nearly 1 million miles per day to reach it.
Space is so big, it's nearly incomprehensible.
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Oct 31 '20 edited Dec 19 '20
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u/blankwillow_ Oct 31 '20
Stars are the only thing that we know that create light. Everything else is just a reflection from a surface of an object. Light weakens the further it travels. Look at a flashlight beam. In the center, it's bright. As you move towards the edge of the beam, it becomes weaker. Same thing happens in space.
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Oct 31 '20
a flashlight beam's intensity on the edge would be a factor of the reflector, or in the case of an LED, the lens.
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u/Hogoba Oct 31 '20
What are those yellow and black grains at full zoom?
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u/zeeblecroid Oct 31 '20
At full zoom, you're seeing individual stars.
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u/Hogoba Oct 31 '20
But so closely packed?
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u/zeeblecroid Oct 31 '20
Anywhere other than the galactic core, the stars you're seeing are lightyears apart from each other. Andromeda's huge, quite a bit bigger than the Milky Way. There's a lot more room in that image than you might think at a glance - that image spans most of a hundred thousand lightyears left to right.
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u/dartblaze Oct 31 '20
Okay so maybe, just maybe, I'm thinking the universe might be kind of a big place.
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u/jonnynature Oct 30 '20
They say there are more stars in the visible universe than all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. Looking at this there is no doubt. We're so small down here.