Beautiful Photograph
Posted on February 16, 2007
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Check this out: Abell S0740.
If you looked at that photograph and said “ho hum” or “been there, done that” or “I could do that, better” - shake your head!
The light that made that photograph is 450 million years old. Million! 450 million years ago lichen had made it onto land. No animals, no insects, lichen. 450 million years ago fish had just started to develop bones (mmm… boneless salmon…). 450 million years ago the Earth looked like this.
And all those disk-like shapes, the swirls, they’re other galaxies. Not solar systems, which are measely collections of planets orbiting a single star (aka “the sun”), but entire globs of solar systems, possibly containing hundreds, maybe thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of planets.
If Earth were in this photograph it would be so infinitesimal small as to not appear at all. Not even as a speck atop another speck of specked speckle on one of the lesser, not-so-bright, somewhere out on the edge objects in this photograph.
And it’s real, not computer generated (in the imaginary, “I stayed up too late last night in front of the computer at home” sense. I suppose it is in the “generated from aggregated light aboard the Hubble telescope over a period of time” sense. I concede that.) Now that’s amazingly cool.
Bonus feature: When good supernova go bad. Oh yeah.
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