Astronomers previously studied the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) in visible and near-infrared light in a series of images captured from 2003 to 2009. The HUDF shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Now, using ultraviolet light, astronomers have combined the full range of colors available to Hubble, stretching all the way from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The resulting image -- made from 841 orbits of telescope viewing time -- contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending back in time to within a few hundred million years of the big bang.

And it's gorgeous!!

oh look!  my two favorite pandawhalers hanging out at the same post!

this photo is amazing.  so i've often wondered: are some of those spots i think are stars when i look at the night sky actually distant galaxies??

Yes! Half a million galaxies looks like this:

Here's the explanation:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/12/10/what-does-a-half-million-galaxies-look-like/

yeeeeeeehaaaaaaw!!  i feel like i just won the lottery!  have you played with the interactive zoom feature on that image?  it's amazing!  (i wish i could do that with my eyeballs on the night sky!)

so it turns out that MOST of the spots we see are galaxies, not stars!?!

whoa.  mind blown.  thanks for sharing that, adam!

i love how at the end he says "marveling at the universe is so deep and so deeply beautiful."

You're right, that interactive zoom is amazing! And the ending line is wonderful.

And yes, most spots we see are galaxies, though some are stars in our own galaxy.

How's this for mind blowing:

Our Earth feels like all there is, but we know that it’s just a tiny planet in a vast Solar System. And our Solar System is just one member of a vast Milky Way galaxy with 200 to 400 billion stars. But how many galaxies are there in the entire Universe?

This is a difficult number to know for certain, since we can only see a fraction of the Universe, even with our most powerful instruments. The most current estimates guess that there are 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the Universe, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars. A recent German supercomputer simulation put that number even higher: 500 billion.

In other words, there could be a galaxy out there for every star in the Milky Way.

those numbers are so big i can't even begin to understand them.

but it does give me a glimpse at how tiny we are!  maybe we really shouldn't sweat the small stuff...  :)

Yes, I think that's the lesson.

Of course, you could just compare the human lifespan (80 years) to the length of recorded human history (5000 years) to reach that same conclusion!

yes, and those are numbers i DO understand!

Geege used the phrase "window of tens of thousands of years" today:

http://pandawhale.com/post/45293/amazing-new-x-ray-image-of-the-whirlpool-galaxy-shows-it-is-dotted-with-black-holes

nice, geege.  that is a great thread.  amazing, really.

It really is. I hope to make more of them someday...