I'm watching the Hubble Ultra Deep Field press conference this morning and the image they're releasing today shows galaxies as they appeared about 700 million years after the Big Bang (at roughly z=7). Pretty cool stuff!

The images should be posted at:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/new...eases/2004/07/

at 9:30 EST.

Anybody else watching?

EDIT: Now that I read the press release, they claim at least 800 million years after the Big Bang, but the presenter said 700 million years -- I suppose that's hardly a blip in cosmic time.

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Maybe he is appeasing the higher and lower Hubble constant camps.

FANTASTIC views!!! Yee - Haaa! It's like being a kid in your uncle's candy store telling you to have at it! WOW.

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I love the almost perfectly formed spiral galaxy in the lower left of the picture. Amazing that we are looking that far into the past. =D>

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I'm confused, please help.

Our galaxy originated with the 'Big Bang' and
then physically traveled to where we are now,
near the edge of the Universe.

How can a telescope, no matter how powerful, see
light from an event that happened about the same
time our Galaxy left the site ?

UnbeLIEVable!

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This is way too cool! I've been digging around in one of the high-res images for a little bit now and there is astounding stuff in here. When the spectra are released I imagine people will go crazy with the data. Rodger Thompson said that at some level there's only so much spectral data you can get, but what they got with this set is way beyond what anyone has done before -- and will be likely to do until JWST goes up.

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http://www.godlikeproductions.com/bb...&showdate=


Nevermind, the nice folks at GLP are willing to help.

and without rude, unbelievable, comments, so far.

Great stuff, just great. I was looking forward to these when they were first announced. =D>

Lots of structure there with long strings of galaxies to connect the dots. Probably spells out something in some intergalctic galactic language.

What a cool thing to see for my birthday!

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h00!

I don't have enough RAM to view it, but I'm downloading the full resolution TIFF

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1) Our galaxy did not "originate with the 'Big bang'". It formed much later.
2) It did not "physically travel" anywhere. It has always been right here.
3) We are not "near the edge of the Universe". The Universe has neither an "edge" nor a "center".

The big bang was the creation of the Universe itself. It did not happen at a specific "place" that we can point to and say "It was over there". It happened at a specific point in time. We can point and say "It was back then". Every point in the entire space-time continuum was there then. We did not leave the site of the big bang. We are still at the site of the big bang.

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Wow… the part that gets me is that there are all these galaxies in a "patch of sky" 1/10th the size of a full moon. I really brings into perspective how inconceivably huge the universe is, and how much of it we will never see.

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http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/redshift.html

This answers my question.

Fantastic! =D> =D>

Ok, so how many galaxies in the presently observable universe? :P

The ACS camera has a field of view of something like 202 arc seconds on a side (I think, someone check). Such a square patch on the sky corresponds to something like 1/1.31e7 of the area of the full sky surrounding the Earth, if I turned the crank correctly (somebody check). So if there are approximately 10,000 galaxies in the ACS view, then we're talking about 10,000 galaxies/ACS field * 13.1 million ACS fields per full sky = 131 billion galaxies.....
....give or take a few billion.

Thats just what we can see... Some of those galaxies may be no more and who knows how many billions or even trillions of others have sprouted up in the many many moons since then.

One really cool thing (among many) is that this was a 1,000,000 second exposure. For those who have not done the math, that's about 11.5 days. A long time to hold the camera/telescope steady. Say cheese.

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...which is why I used the phrase "observable universe".

I have added the word "presently" to make it more precise. It's unlikely that galaxies have ceased to exist, once formed. However, it is likely that the universe is FAR, FAR larger than we can observe at present (or may ever observe, if the expansion rate is accelerating).

ops: ops:

oopsie

As far as the "no more" galaxies I had more in mind things like galaxy collisions, absorptions ect... I "might" be persuaded to say that there could be a couple of them that have been swallowed up completely by a super massive black hole, but that is kinda reaching.

The HUDF supposedly gives a pretty good accounting for most galaxies in our past light cone beyond approximately 1 billion years ago (it purposely excluded "nearby" galaxies from its view). What those galaxies we see in the HUDF are doing "now" is anybody's guess (though unlikely to have been swallowed up by SMBHs).

Wow.

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What a treat! We only had 80 billion last month!

Has anyone named them yet? :wink:

How many more are in there that we don't see? #-o Considering the age is approximately known, maybe there might be a reasonable guess at this point as to what may still be out there.

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ToSeek beat me to it with an independent estimate, close to mine.

Man, that's a lot of structure so early in the evolution of the universe. Of course, the entire universe was a lot smaller back then, but Jeez, that's a LOT of galaxies!

And photons from the faintest objects are coming in at 1 photon per minute??? Now, that is pretty faint!

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A plot of the number of galaxies per redshift interval vs. redshift would be useful in this regard....

Spiff, you're one of the pros here. What are some of the investigations that any one of us might do using this treasure of data that has just been given to us?

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Probably no one on Earth, but it does give the people who sell the "Put your name on a star" a lot of material to work with. #-o

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They make the ususal claim that we're seeing all kinds of weird galaxies at these immense distances:

But I don't see any evidence for this in the actual photos. Just the usual grand spirals, etc.

Just an idle musing from a Big Bang doubter.

You'll have to download a higher resolution image, and scroll around.

Is this known as the Zeno Theory of Astronomy ?