Thursday, May 27, 2010

Each dot in this image is a galaxy containing billions of stars

From the Astute Bloggers:


Galaxies Like Grains of Sand in New Herschel Image

Image of the distant Universe as seen by Herschel’s SPIRE instrument Credit: ESA / SPIRE and HerMES consortia
Wow. Just wow. Each of the colored dots in this new image from the Herschel telescope is a galaxy containing billions of stars. These are distant luminous infrared galaxies, and appear as they did 10–12 billion years ago, packed together like grains of sand on a beach, forming large clusters of galaxies by the force of their mutual gravity.
PRAISE THE LORD!

7 comments:

Damien said...

Pastorius,

This is why I know we can't be along in the universe. Even if intelligent life is incredibly rare, there have to be some aliens civilizations out there, somewhere. Let's just hope their benign and peaceful.

revereridesagain said...

Guys, that looks like my carpet when it needs vacuuming. Is that a compressed photo or is it really that crowded out there?

Damien said...

Revere Rides Again,

I think the photo is pretty compressed but there are still a huge number of stars in the Milky War Galaxy alone. In the entire universe there are more stars than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.

revereridesagain said...

Just watch -- somewhere in the MSM, someone is going to try to pass that off as a photo of the oil spill.

Suricou Raven said...

And yet somehow people can look out at this vastness, this space incomprehensable of which we occupy the merest microscopic dot upon a microscopic dot, and conclude that it was all made espicially just for us.

mah29001 said...

Kind of reminds me of what would happen at the end of a Men and Black movie...where the galaxies of the universe would end up creating another world.

Pastorius said...

Suricou,
It wasn't created for us. It was created for ME.

;-)