Hubble shows images from record-breaking 13.1 billion light-years The Hubble telescope has broken its own distance record, spotting a cluster of five galaxies 13.1billion light-years away. They were spotted as part of the Brightest Reionizing Galaxies (BoRG) survey, which aims to scan the theoretical edges of the universe. In a paper to the American Astronomical Society meeting Michele …
... when our most venerated telescope finally closes its eyes on the heavens.
When its time comes, we should find a way to move it into a stable parking orbit, so a future vehicle suitable for satellite recovery can bring it home intact, rather than let it be consumed by re-entry.
If any device deserves to be preserved in the Smithsonian, this is it...
A fair chunk of the "original" HST is already in the Smithsonian. COSTAR (Hubble's "glasses"), the Faint Object Spectrograph and Wide Field & Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC1 was used to create WFPC3!) are there at least, and the Faint Object Camera is somewhere in Germany last I heard - Dornier museum? Not sure where the Goddard Spectrograph ended up, but it came back to earth.
The telescope itself, as you say is likely to fall out of orbit in the next decade, but on the last servicing mission, NASA installed a glorified "hook" to help any robotic mission that might go get it. The original plan was to get it back with a Shuttle, but that plan's long gone out the window now :-(
...we didn't have the Space Shuttle after the initial deployment of the HST. The Space Shuttle was the only space vehicle available that could perform the repairs, servicing, and upgrades to the HST, and now we have no such vehicle available to us. If not for the Shuttle, HST would have been put into an orbit to have the same fate as Phobos-Grunt. I can't imagine how the world would be without the amazing discoveries and pictures Hubble has captured.
Decommissioning of the Space Shuttle before its time: That's one small step toward budget reduction, one giant leap BACKWARDS for mankind.
Seriously, it should have been replaced with something better many years ago, instead of keeping the old dinosaur running. The Shuttle wasn't anywhere near as reusable as it was supposed to be, and a heck of a lot more expensive per launch.
Unfortunately, because it wasn't replaced and nobody was even working on a replacement, we're now in a situation where it got cancelled with no replacement the moment the economy got bad.
Orion looks like a bad joke - It's only a bigger Apollo, far too little, far too late. Hopefully cheap, but I doubt it given the main contractors. It won't fly for several years anyway.
At this rate, China will have cheap, manned heavy lift and return long before the US gets it back or the ESA (ha!) get any at all.
It wouldn't have been as successful, but the HST results before the first service mission (remember, it operated "broken" for three years) were still considerably better than ground-based telescopes at the time. Things have changed, in that ground-based systems are pretty much able to rival Hubble by using adaptive optics.
If it weren't for the initial design of Hubble, it would have likely been replaced within 3-5 years anyway. There have been about 40+ space telescopes to date, Hubble is only well known due to its longevity and by operating in the visible spectrum, which also has its limits. That's also the reason there are no direct successors to Hubble - it's far more useful to look at the more red-shifted frequencies.
Without a space shuttle, they would simply have made them more frequently - the cost of the HST programme (including it's 5 services component costs) could have been split into multiple, especially if you remove the cost of the Shuttle programme.
Without the Shuttle programme, the space programme would certainly look different, but not necessarily any less advanced! :-)
"Hubble is only well known due to its longevity and by operating in the visible spectrum, which also has its limits."
Not arguing the point, but when you are looking for public backing for trillion dollar budgets pretty pictures go a long long way. Just over 13 billion years away apparently.
Actually the *size* of the observable universe is around 95 billion light-years (in diameter). Although the age is only 14 billion years.
This is because of the inflation of space that happened early on in the universe. Any light that has been in transit since the beginning of the universe has come from a source that is now much further away than a simple distance/time calculation indicates. While the light beam was travelling, the actual units of space between it and it's source have expanded dramatically (particularly early on in it's journey).
"Actually the *size* of the observable universe is around 95 billion light-years (in diameter)."
Doubtful.
When you receive your redshifted photon NOW, by measuring the redshift you know how long (and thus how far) it has travelled: 13 billion years. I assume that you try to say that the galaxy is "now" 95 billion light years away, but there is no well-defined "now" in that sense. Special relativity gets rid of simultaneity of events, and quite viciously so the further away these events are (just changing one's speed *here* by a meter per second shifts the relative times of events in Andromeda by many years IIRC)
Mainstream physics says the universe is 13.75 billion years old, and 93 billion light-years in diameter, taking relativity into account. If you choose not to believe in the expansion of the universe, or relativity, then go argue with people on youtube, or find flaws in the various measurements.
"The age of the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years. While it is commonly understood that nothing can accelerate to velocities equal to or greater than that of light, it is a common misconception that the radius of the observable universe must therefore amount to only 13.7 billion light-years. This reasoning makes sense only if the universe is the static spacetime of special relativity, but in the real universe, spacetime is expanding, as evidenced by Hubble's law. Distances obtained as the speed of light multiplied by a cosmological time interval have no direct physical significance."
... isn't visible in any wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum - the primordial fireball, as bright and impressive the term may sound, actually was 100% opaque, because the universe started in thermal equilibrium and whatever photons there were constantly got absorbed and reemitted - up to the time when radiation and matter decoupled; only after neutral hydrogen atoms finally formed and no longer were reionized since the temperature / average background radiation energy had dropped sufficiently, said radiation became free/visible - the cosmic background. It's considerably _younger_ (a few hundred thousands of years) than the universe itself.
The only way to look "through" that "wall of fire" are indirect methods (density waves imprinting themselves on the radiation) or, if it ever becomes possible to detect them at those low energies, the cosmic neutrino background (which decoupled a few minutes after the big bang).
Now here's a thought....
If it takes 13.1 Billion years for the light to get here, and if the universe ends in a big crunch in anything *less* that 13.1 Billion years, does that light *accelerate* in order to get here in time ?
My brain hurts just thinking about that one.
..ok , so we can see 13.1 billion light years to the "beginning of the universe" right?
and that would make us 13.6 bill years after the big bang approximately , ...so have we been traveling at the speed of light in our galaxy away from the big bang? how else would we be 13 billion light years away unless we were moving the speed of light right? which would either mean we've been here longer than 13 billion years or we(our galaxy) have gone much faster than the speed of light in the past at some time ....which is impossible. I am no physicist by any stretch of the imagination , and i'm sure i missed something here , but if we are 13.1 billion light years from an object and are not travelling away from that object at the speed of light , then we must have either been travelling away from said object for longer than 13.1 billion years , or been going faster than the speed of light for a time, or we must have been here before? someone please shoot my theory full of holes and dash my hopes of the Nobel prize lol
You have to take into account that space itself has been getting bigger for 13 10^9 years as well. What I want to know is where's the middle? If the universe is expanding and by tracking backwards we come to the idea of the Big Bang, then where (in our current universe) did it happen? And if these galaxies are on the 'other side', then doesn't that mean the universe could be only 6 1/2 10^9 years old?
My head hurts as well (see icon)
"away from the big bang?"
Nope, because the Big Bang is not "somewhere" but "somewhen" - in your past! In fact, it "is" your past, in the same sense as the Big Crunch "is" your future (if there is one, which seems to not be the case)
Do not envision the Big Bang as a point in space but rather as space coming into hot existence *everywhere* (where "everywhere" could be a closed universe just a few planck lengths across or possibly a universe already of infinite size) with time starting off *from then* (with the "future" direction most probably not even well defined)
Er, no. Even had the Big Bang been a perfectly even explosion, the universe would not be symmetrical because it is composed of different types of matter with different weights. This in turn affects both the gravity in and the velocity of various parts of the universe. The distribution of mass would have shifted within picoseconds of the Big Bang.
Space is expanding true, but are you saying that spaces expansion is outside the cosmic speed limit of the speed of light? If a body is in "space" and goes the speed of light , then the rate of expansion is added to the speed of light?...and forgive me if im wrong , but isnt the fact that two objects are traveling away from each other indeed the very "expansion of space" you are talking about?
also no expert but the universe expanding comments here have me thinking of 2 dots painted on a balloon - when you inflate the ballon the dots are further apart although they are both painted on the same bit of baloon surface they were to begin with - they haven't 'moved'. Theoretically the dots could move in opposite directions, each at the speed of light relative to the balloon surface and the balloon could also be expanding to increase their seperation further. If I'm not mistaken, an outside observer would only see them moving apart at the speed of light anyway, cos relativity says so. or something.
Going by the balloon comparison: The dots painted on the surface also expand in the same proportion as the space between them... are we also expanding with the universe? are we getting "bigger" in some dimension my puny brain is unable to even start comprehend?
... my mind literally boggles. I'm feeling dizzy, and small, after reading all these comments
I was thinking about that too yesterday - if EVERYTHING was expanding at the same rate, would we even notice? would it have any measurable effect? For this to even work various universal laws/constants would probably have to auto adjust to give consistant results as the universe grows - ants (after a few billion years of expansion) collapsing under their own gravity to form stars/black holes would be amusing perhaps, but only briefly.
The balloon (ballon/baloon) metaphor still holds up if you assume a molecule sized dot painted on a single molecule of balloon(etc) surface - molecules get further apart when the ballo(ohforgetit) expands, without increasing in size (probably - I've never examined a balloothingy expanding under a microscope).
I wonder this: Can more Hubbles or similars be put up to help triangulate where the "center" of expansion is? Would the resolution be good enough to help us figure out if we're near the "center" or off on some wagging tail of the ever-expanding universe.
Also, do we have a good understanding of how the universe truly is shaped? Is it spherical, fluted, tail-like? Is it tubular, is it bell-shaped?
"Also, do we have a good understanding of how the universe truly is shaped? Is it spherical, fluted, tail-like? Is it tubular, is it bell-shaped?"
There's a certain ambiguity about the shape of something so large that disparate parts of it are mutually nonexistent. I'm going to go with the simple answer: "Yes."
a spherical loaf of bread dough, not yet risen. Put it in a gravity-free environment and place raisins all over the surface of the dough. Now let it rise.
Imagine that the raisins are two-dimensional creatures whose sight travels along the surface of the sphere. They each would see all of the other raisins moving away from them as the dough expands, and so might conclude that they are at the center of their expanding universe. But in reality there is no discernible center; the center actually lies perpendicular to them in a dimension beyond their perception. From their viewpoint, space is expanding everywhere in all directions.
That's the way I convince my brain to believe what the scientists are telling me.
I suppose one way to think about it using the balloon/rising bread analogy is...
Think of the centre of the universe AS the big bang and the expansion being the time filling the "balloon". Or something.
Big bang go boom, time inflates space, pushing the skin of the universe where we live out.
I know it's wrong, but it stops all the "where's the centre of the universe" questions. The centre of the universe is the big bang.
Of course, using this model the universe looks a very weird shape indeed to residents of the "surface" cos light takes so long, so they pereive themselves to be on the "far away from the centre" skin, and then see the skin shrivel and shrink towards the centre as they look back in time.
I wonder if we'll ever be able to look back fat enough to see something CLOSE to the big bang. I know the microwave background radiation is that, but something as the first stars formed perhaps...
The centre is both everywhere and nowhere. The cosmic microwave background radiation is the extremely redshifted "glow" from the initial big bang and can be seen roughly uniformly in every direction you look in space.
The easiest way to think about the expansion is like living on a surface of an inflating balloon where you can only perceive the 2-dimenstions, and trying to figure out where the expansion originates from.
...so utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Then I took an arrow to the knee.
I would just be happy if we could just send a probe to Uranus and another to Neptune before I'm gone. (I do not have any hopes, I'm nearly 40 now)
This is so at least I die knowing what's on the backyard of the solar system.
The rest of the universe is out of reach.
The only solution then is to grab a tape measure, fasten one end to Toronto* and head out. What radius (thus diameter) would that process (eventually) give? :-) I think AC makes an interesting point, even if the actual number is a point for debate.
* Toronto = the center of the Universe (ask anyone)
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