We currently think that the universe is some 13.7 billion years old. With that in mind, the zoomed-in cutaway above is pointing to a very, very distant galaxy, which we've observed 420 million years after the big bang. That means the light we're seeing from it spent 13.3 billion years traveling through the cosmos. Whoa.
The Hubble telescope has captured literally thousands of photos of the starry skies — each one beautiful in its own right. Now, these gorgeous photos have been pieced together in a mosaic that recreates Van Gogh's seminal The Starry Night.
We've seen graphic depictions mapping the relative scale of our universe, but nothing beats actually looking into the void and seeing what's really out there. This week the Hubble Space Telescope released images that take us farther than we've ever gone before.
This star is named Camelopardalis (which used to be what people called giraffes), and it's up by the North Celestial Pole. You can't actually see the star itself (it takes up about one pixel in the center of the image), but you can see a giant ring of gas that the star has coughed out. If your body was full of soot and carbon monoxide, you'd be coughing too.
We all know about the FBI and the CIA, but you might not be as familiar with the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency responsible for our spy satellites. The NRO apparently has more of these things than it knows what to do with, and it's decided to donate two Hubble-sized spy sats to NASA to play with.
The last time we got an up close and personal look at Uranus was in 1986, when Voyager 2 flew past and did some probing. Back then, we got some spectral hints that Uranus had aurorae, but it's taken another 25 years for Hubble to take some pictures of the light show in action.
With a few exceptions, space seems very static to us humans with our short lifetimes. By stitching together some 14 years of Hubble images of young stars emitting huge jets of gas, astronomers have created videos that show how dynamic our universe actually is.
The Hubble space telescope is tirelessly peering into the universe around us, and a group of researchers recently confirmed that Hubble has set a record for the most distant object seen yet. What's more, the existence of the distant galaxy is raising new questions.
Oh, Hubble! How we love the view of distant galaxies you offer us. Up today is the Lagoon Nebula in the Sagittarius constellation. Hubble's taken a picture so clear that you can see every ripple in the nebula's murky starscape.