Thursday, January 9, 2014

Cool New Science

Yesterday, NASA released it's deepest view of the cosmos ever taken.  Sort of. I offer it here, but it's available here too if you want an even  higher resolution view.

This long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image of massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (foreground) is the deepest ever made of any cluster of galaxies. It shows some of the faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected in space.
I say "sort of" above as it was actually imaged using a phenomena known as gravitational lensing - that situation where gravity from a very large, heavy object bends light.  This effect had previously appeared in some of the Hubble Space Telescope's earlier deep space images and it mildly obscures what's 'behind' it. (I'm using very general language here, the scientific concepts are quite involved).
By harnessing that very same gravitational lensing, NASA has used it as a further amplification of the area behind the galaxies that were bending light / obscuring in previous images.  In this case it's the gravity effect of the Abell 2744 galaxy being used in this way.
This is interesting in a number of ways.  Firstly, some very bright person at NASA came up with the idea that what had previously been an issue in earlier images could be itself leveraged as a tool for them.  Brilliant.  
Secondly, in my mind at least. as extremely deep space images are also a trip back in time (the light captured here on the camera's sensors will have had to travel for 12 Billion+ light years to get here, based on it's distance from us), doesn't this point to the area in the sky where it all began ?  Stay with me here for a moment.  If the universe is expanding as was proven by Edwin Hubble in 1929, then in theory we should be able to locate it's origin point.  If we make the analogy that we're on a ballon that keeps expanding so all points around us are moving farther away, then in theory where we look and see greater density in the past, points in the general direction of where it all started.  Doesn't it ? I'll admit I'm at the limits of my own knowledge of physics and I may be 100% incorrect based on what I don't know - but based on imagery like NASA just released...it makes one wonder a little. And I think that's the point.

 



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