"We Asked NASA Scientists and Astronauts... 'What is your Favorite Hubble Image?'"
Hi, my name is Paul Morris, and I'm a video producer for the Hubble Space Telescope.
Over the years, I've had the amazing opportunity to interview some of the brightest minds in
astrophysics, and some of the coolest astronauts and people in the world. As a rule, I always ask
every single person this one question. Every. Single. Time.
This is the cliche question,
but what's your favorite Hubble image? Oh, what is my favorite Hubble image? Ah.
Can you talk about your favorite Hubble image?
What is your favorite Hubble image and why?
I began to see a pattern in their answers.
The Hubble Deep Field.
The Ultra Deep Field.
One of the questions you were going to ask me was, what was my favorite image? My favorite image is
the Deep Field image because it's one that that tells an incredible story about our universe.
Back In 1994, Robert Williams, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore, Maryland, came up with a plan. He wanted to point Hubble at a spot in the sky
where there was seemingly nothing there. A lot of scientists and astronomers at
the time thought this was a huge waste of valuable Hubble resources and pushed back.
Williams, however, continued forward with his plan. He controlled 10 percent of Hubble’s observation
time, known as director’s discretionary time. He decided to use some of that to
take a long exposure that would be made immediately available to the public.
Taken over the course of 10 days in 1995,
the Hubble Deep Field captured roughly 3,000 distant galaxies in various stages
of evolution. 3,000 galaxies where it seemed like there was nothing. The world was stunned.
When we finally looked at what came back it was one of the most
mind-boggling images of the whole Hubble collection. Galaxies with billions of stars and
billions of planets we know nowadays, and guess what? One of those planets
in this image may have somebody like you or me, or some other intelligent life form
that we don't even know about yet, so we got to keep searching. We gotta tell that story, you know?
The “deep” in Hubble Deep Field refers to the telescope’s ability to look at some of these far,
faint objects. Looking at far-away objects in space is like seeing back in time. Light moves
at tremendous speeds, but it still takes time to travel across the vastness of space. Even
the light from our own Sun needs eight minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth, so when we look at the
Sun, we see it as it was a little more than eight minutes earlier. The farther away the object,
the younger it appears in Hubble’s eyes. The Deep Field was like a core sample of space, showing
galaxies at different and earlier stages of development the deeper they appeared in the image.
Science and astronomy is all about honing and improving our senses.
No one expected the Hubble deep field to have thousands of galaxies in that single image…
We thought X, and we were so wrong. And that experiment, it took great engineering to do,
with a great system, Hubble, allowed the astrophysics to say, "hold it!" You know, "it's
different." It helped connect the dark energy, dark matter theories, to what the light we can see is,
and for me, it's beautiful because it's like looking into a pond and seeing the water
molecules, and the living cells that are micron around, of the microbes, it's like that kind of
moment. It must have been like the early microscopists who first looked at pond scum
and said, "geez there's stuff going on!" Or Galileo when he first sensed the satellites of Jupiter.
Since the original Hubble Deep Field, Hubble has gone on to collect over 20 deep
fields of various parts of the sky in multiple wavelengths of light. To create each image,
it has gazed at the same point in space for many orbits, gathering as much light as it can.
Every single one of these increased our knowledge of the universe and our place in it.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, for instance, released in 2004,
had a longer exposure time than the previous deep field.
This new snapshot contained even more galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors.
The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known,
existing when the universe was just 800 million years old.
When I stare at that image, my imagination goes wild. I wonder what it would be like to
visit any one of those little smudges of light, which would be, presumably, possibly similar to our
own Milky Way Galaxy, and also realizing that if we extrapolate that image to the whole sky, that's
what our universe looks like. In any direction, we see a collection of galaxies like that.
The width of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is less than 1/10 the diameter
of the full moon. That’s like looking through the eye of a needle held at arm's length.
And in that tiny space we found 10,000 galaxies.
10,000 galaxies in that single space, 10,000 galaxies in that one too,
10,000 galaxies there, and 10,000 galaxies there,
10,000 galaxies there, and 10,000 galaxies there too.
If you add them all up, that means the entire observable universe
is estimated to contain at least 200 billion galaxies.
200 billion galaxies. If each galaxy has an average of 100 million stars in it,
then that means there are at least 20 quintillion stars in the observable universe.
That’s a 2 with 19 zeros after it!
It makes me, of course just overwhelmed, but also, just very curious about,
wouldn't it be wonderful if I could just beam myself over to one of those galaxies and explore
around and see if they have stars and planets like we have in our own Milky Way? And just to
be amazed, not only at the magnitude of the universe but to be grateful that I can be
a part of the universe and have the ability to look out and see this grandeur. That's what I
love about the Ultra Deep Field, and that's what I love about astronomy images in general.
Inspired by Hubble’s Deep Field,
other NASA Great Observatories would go on to take deep field images in their own wavelengths
of light. These observations continue to make NASA science even richer than before.
The Hubble Space Telescope has helped us take a step forward
in understanding our place in the universe.
With Hubble’s mirror acting as our eyes, we are just starting to perceive the real universe.
And the deep field images are yet another step forward to a brighter tomorrow.
The image itself might not look as beautiful as a single spiral galaxy where you see all the stars.
But what you're looking at is a tiny little part of the sky, and they found thousands of
galaxies in that tiny little spot. And so you see this image, and the ones that are a little
closer to us, you can see some detail on. You can actually see that they're spiral galaxies,
or kind of blobby elliptical galaxies. They're actually beautiful little galaxies
in and of themselves. Of course they're not little, they're just very far away.
But then you see this background, which really just becomes dots. And each one of those dots is not
a star, but a collection of hundreds of billions of stars, just so far away that it appears as a dot.
And some of the smaller dots in that image, you're looking at galaxies as they were,
you know, more than 10, 11 billion years ago. In this tiny little dot in the sky, you can look
through it, and you can see the history of the whole universe. And so when you see the Hubble
Deep Field, you know I can feel, you know, the hair rising on the back of my neck, and
I'm getting goosebumps even just thinking about it, you know, through a tiny little pinhole you
can see the whole history of the universe, right there. That's the Hubble Deep Field.
Wow.
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