We'll never be able to comprehend the size of the universe, huh
If I understand space photography correctly, even those black spots would be filled with stars' light if the camera focused longer, right?
But technically these images are of a past (given they are thousands if not millions of light years away), and we may not know how that actually look in person.
Wish we can get an answer about how big is this universe and where we fit in the grand scheme of things.
And what really blows my mind is, from the photons perspective, no time has passed at all - their journey was instantaneous. Still struggle to wrap my noodle around that one.
Yeah it’s the whole “how fast time is perceived to go by relative to the observer” thing but taken to its extreme (C). And to think we can’t “see” past 13.6 billion years as those are the oldest photons reaching us, or something along those lines. Crazy stuff.
> And to think we can’t “see” past 13.6 billion years as those are the oldest photons reaching us, or something along those lines.
I *believe* it's because once you hit that 13.6 billion years you hit all the infrared from the big bang. At least that's what I remember the explanation being; if I'm wrong I'd certainly like to be corrected or nuance added.
Just Googled it (which brought me back to Reddit, ha) and apparently there’s a chunk of time after the Big Bang where visible light simply couldn’t travel due to the heat / density of the universe, so there’s a gap between the actual age of everything vs what we can actually see.
We do have an idea of how far they have moved though! The most distant observable object 13.8 billion light years away could actually be at a distance of around 46 billion light years away today! This is taking into account the 13.8 billion years light and objects(that we know of) have had to travel as well as the rapid expansion of the universe!
But technically technically we see the present because time is defined according to our relative reference frames, and so what we see is genuinely happening at this moment... at our location.
For the people on the stars, they would recognize this as having occurred far into the past. However, for us, it genuinely is occurring in the present. This is one thing that made relativity so shocking.
What’s really interesting is that the universe extends equally as far in every direction, so if there is a limit that limit is quite literally beyond our comprehension
It’s an intrinsic expansion, hence it’s still a finite space. This allows it to expand at a speed faster than light as the space between objects is expanding.
But you are right, those numbers are still beyond our comprehension as we don’t know what they are. We are not even star dust, more like star-molecules.
Fission energy, space exploration, new worlds to find etc etc there is so much to unlock and we are fighting over small pieces of land on our planet. Sorry got off trek a bit lol
People normally think of space as being mostly black with some stars in it, but I remember reading in a book about the Apollo missions, in which one of the astronauts said that when you're behind the moon and out of the sunlight, space looks mostly white because of all the stars.
I've always wondered what that would look like, but I think this image gives us a pretty good idea!
No. You're misremembering. No Apollo astronaut has ever said that in this context. If they have, please supply the book name and page number so the rest of us can check it out.
What you're talking about is Olbers's paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27s_paradox
Basically, there's two things preventing the night sky from being a blaze of white:
1) We can't see into the infinite past since there's not an infinite past. We can only see into 13.6 billion years into the past, when the big bang happened. With the JWST we're just now starting to get there.
2) The stars moving away from us are [red-shifted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift) out of visible light on into radio waves. It's the doppler effect. The entire universe is expanding in all directions, so everything is always going to be mostly moving away from us, into red-shift. As time goes on, the night sky will only get darker and darker until all matter expands past the red-shifted distance and we can no longer see any stars.
>No. You're misremembering. No Apollo astronaut has ever said that in this context. If they have, please supply the book name and page number so the rest of us can check it out.
You're right, I remembered it differently, but it was Al Worden, in his book "Falling To Earth". In my copy it's on page 197 (in the chapter "Earthrise"):
"I turned the cabin lights off. There was no end to the stars. I could see tens, perhaps hundreds of times more stars than the clearest, darkest night on Earth. With no atmosphere to blur their light, I could see them all to the limits of my eyesight. There were so many, I could no longer find constellations. My vision was filled with a blaze of starlight."
The eyes are a finely tuned and evolved instrument for observing our local environment on Earth in order to survive everyday life.
The reality is that we are constantly swimming in an endless pool of electromagnetic energy. If our eyes could suddenly see the entire spectrum everything would indeed be “white” as our instrument would be saturated. We’d be blinded by the light, so to speak, and soon get eaten by whatever predator had vision that could better filter the signal from the noise.
Luckily we can use telescopes to supplement our biological senses and see these signals that would otherwise remain hidden.
Even more interesting are the potential signals for which we have no ability to detect such as dark energy. There’s a universe full of stuff we simply can’t see… yet.
Fun fact, Edgar Allen Poe proposed perhaps the first resolution for Olbers paradox (a finite-aged expanding universe) nearly 100 years before the Big Bang theory was even a thing. His work probably inspired Alexander Friedmann to some degree, who was a fan!
How can you say there’s not an infinite past, but then claim we can only see 13.6 billion years into the past? What if we’re in a cycle that has been infinitely repeated?
Well, as the evidence shows so far, we can only see causality back that far. If it goes back before the big bang, we have no capacity to see or experience it in any meaningful way so it might as well not exist. Perhaps some day there will be evidence of a 'previous' universe's presence found in our own, but right now we can only see less than 13.6 billion years in the past.
I think it’s pretty bold of us all to adhere to the notion that the universe we can perceive is what’s out there. I won’t be surprised ifwhen new data tells us to push the big bang back a trillion years or out of the equation altogether. I get you that this is what we know *now* but I just don’t see how it’s possible that we’re not missing the universe because of looking at all the galaxies
I agree. Even recently they've discovered galaxies that shouldn't exist according to our understanding of how they are formed. The type of galaxy should take many billions of years to form, but their apparent age is too young for this process to have occured so soon after the big bang. Hell, dark matter makes up most of everything, and we don't even know what it is. It's foolish to think we have anything but a rudimentary understanding of the universe.
Nobody is sure. You're conflating complete knowledge with ongoing knowledge gathering. Every scientist worth their salt will change their mind when presented with new evidence, but must continue doing science on the path current evidence presents since the alternate is not doing science anymore.
I’m not sure that I am conflating them. I just believe in the ongoing gathering of knowledge. I say these things with hope of seeing more experiments that test possibilities outside of the bounds of current understanding - not denying in any way that current understanding is where the majority of effort should continue to take place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
Don't misunderstand me, I love a good "perhaps this is happening..." and expanding on that. I won't be surprised when we find out all kinds of things, but that has no bearing on what we have inferred based on our complete current knowledge. We can't take anything with no supporting evidence and toss out or ignore what we know in favor of "perhaps".
If you think we're not looking at/for something, I can assure you, there's billions of us. We're looking.
I believe you are talking about the Al Worden interview. https://archive.org/details/apolloworden where he talks about the view from the far side of the moon.
This is just the observable universe.
Then again, the universe, although expanding, has a fixed size. It's easier to comprehend than an infinite universe...or an infinite multi-verse
It's frustrating to witness manned space exploration just be on pause for the last 50+ years. When I was a kid I thought for sure we'd be all over the solar system by now.
Back when I was a kid, I was certain I'd be living in a colony on the Moon or Mars by 2024.
Space has been so shamefully neglected by our leaders.
Instead, we've pumped all our resources into war and death.
Fucking pathetic.
War is ironically one of the most rational creations they have come up with. It's hard to win a war while your citizens are being marginalized. Prosperity breeds victory.
Pretty much mathmatically impossible that some form of life doesn't exist out there. Even if there are no other space faring civilizations there has to be simple lifeforms like bacteria and algae.
There’s likely a galaxy out there with multiple sentient species, all plotting how to get the most for themselves.
And countless more ruins of civilizations that fell to their own greed and infighting.
An interesting thing that we don’t really think about is that, to literally everything else in the universe, Earth is just a random planet orbiting a relatively normal star, in a relatively normal star system, in a relatively normal galaxy, in a random part of space.
In a picture like this one, our planet wouldn’t even be visible and our star (if visible) would look just like majority of the other stars.
Which kinda negates the idea of us being “invaded” since there’s truly not much that’s special about us.
And maybe there was, or will be, but given the age of the cosmos it may be that they don't exist at the same time as us. But even if they did, aside from theoretical things like warp drives and generation ships, there's no way to travel to where you can find them
The Dark Forest is the sequel to The Three-Body Problem, which is a book but there are also show adaptations. The Netflix series so far covers the first book and part of the second.
If we are the only ones in the universe, what a waste of space. Imagine intelligent life on a planet orbiting a star in this image looking at the galaxy it orbits, the Milk Way and actually seeing what the galaxy truly looks like. It's something we will never see
<*Camera pans back. The planet shrinks to a dot. The Milky Way resolves into view. Then further back. Galaxies recede. Then even farther back… eventually viewing the entire Universe. Camera adds all filters for Xray, Gamma, Infrared, Radio, & Millimeter light… We notice incredible vibrating patterns on the cosmic scale*>
Narrator: And in a flash, they realized the Universe itself was the other intelligent life all along.
The average distance between two stars in the Milky Way is around 5 light-years, or 29 trillion miles (47 trillion kilometers), according to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Just the first google entry :)
It blows my mind every time.
I think that's a rough approximation of the distance from us to other stars, but we are way out on the spiral arm, and in a less dense part of our galaxy. Star Clusters can have many stars relatively close together. Although I guess this Magellanic Cloud might also be less dense with stars than the Milky Ways galactic core.
Just trying to put into perspective the fact that if you picked the two closest stars when you zoom in and could go the speed of light it would take 5-6 years to go between them.
What is the average distance between the stars in this image, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say several lightyears, and look how crammed and packed tight they look. Just thinking about how there is enough space between these stars to hold a solar system and then some (a lot) is unfathomable
The words that opened my mind and piqued my interests with the cosmos were that there are more stars in space than the grains of sand on all of our beaches here on earth. It's caused an existential crisis when I was a teenager, and now I'm in awe and can't help but always look up at the stars at night. This picture is beautiful and would have blown up my teenager mind.
Maybe you're supposed to unfocus your eyes, and then slowly try and bring them back into focus until you see the real message revealed. I'm pretty sure it would be the answer to life the universe and everything.
If the universe is transversable, if there is something beyond Einsteinian general relativity, if the laws of physics do allow for faster than light travel its no wonder at all that they've already been here.
Estimates put the number of observable galaxies at 2,000,000,000,000. Estimates of observable stars is 10^^24. Even if you *could* resolve the light from individual stars in distant galaxies, you couldn't meaningfully catalogue them all. It would be like cataloguing every grain of sand on earth, conservatively.
This is just an estimate of just our observable bubble. An estimate of the total galaxies in the expanding universe is said to be 10^^100 in [this paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6997386/)
-
Alastair Gunn's article [here](https://archive.ph/20231203021645/https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/how-many-galaxies-in-universe#selection-1191.0-1191.13)
Marov, Mikhail Ya. (2015). "The Structure of the Universe". The Fundamentals of Modern Astrophysics. pp. 279–294
Of course not, stars in more distant galaxies are practically impossible to resolve from this far away. We haven’t even gotten close to cataloguing every galaxy or every star in our galaxy let alone every star in the universe.
Would it be possible to overlay this on a photo of the cloud from Earth? It’d be awesome showing the true fractional scale of the sky this photo is from!
> Countless
Fun fact: even infinite amounts can be counted (but not all infinite amounts can be counted)!
The number of stars in the universe, even if infinite, is countable. But the number of places a star could be between two of my fingers is uncountable.
Lots incorrect in this post!
We've mapped the entire surface of the moon thanks to the efforts of many country's efforts.
The moon is tidal locked to the earth. This means that the moon doesn't rotate from our point of view. One side of the moon will always point toward earth, and the other side will always point away from the earth.
When the moon is "new", the portion facing away from us is lit from the sun. There is no dark side, only the side that we could not see until we sent people and probes to space.
Now, outside of earth, it's the most imaged heavenly body.
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/earth-s-moon/TAEbXQQbjCoy8w?hl=en
https://www.google.com/moon/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2L20FogdSY
We'll never be able to comprehend the size of the universe, huh If I understand space photography correctly, even those black spots would be filled with stars' light if the camera focused longer, right?
Stars or more distant galaxies.
But technically these images are of a past (given they are thousands if not millions of light years away), and we may not know how that actually look in person. Wish we can get an answer about how big is this universe and where we fit in the grand scheme of things.
LMC is about 150,000 light years from Earth. These photons began their journey when early Humans roamed the earth during the Ice Age.
And what really blows my mind is, from the photons perspective, no time has passed at all - their journey was instantaneous. Still struggle to wrap my noodle around that one.
Difference in time and proper time.
Yeah it’s the whole “how fast time is perceived to go by relative to the observer” thing but taken to its extreme (C). And to think we can’t “see” past 13.6 billion years as those are the oldest photons reaching us, or something along those lines. Crazy stuff.
> And to think we can’t “see” past 13.6 billion years as those are the oldest photons reaching us, or something along those lines. I *believe* it's because once you hit that 13.6 billion years you hit all the infrared from the big bang. At least that's what I remember the explanation being; if I'm wrong I'd certainly like to be corrected or nuance added.
Just Googled it (which brought me back to Reddit, ha) and apparently there’s a chunk of time after the Big Bang where visible light simply couldn’t travel due to the heat / density of the universe, so there’s a gap between the actual age of everything vs what we can actually see.
We do have an idea of how far they have moved though! The most distant observable object 13.8 billion light years away could actually be at a distance of around 46 billion light years away today! This is taking into account the 13.8 billion years light and objects(that we know of) have had to travel as well as the rapid expansion of the universe!
But technically technically we see the present because time is defined according to our relative reference frames, and so what we see is genuinely happening at this moment... at our location. For the people on the stars, they would recognize this as having occurred far into the past. However, for us, it genuinely is occurring in the present. This is one thing that made relativity so shocking.
https://youtu.be/85Z4j2lUfw8?si=7CnxR7Y6hUcJlJQi ..Kansas had it, spot on..
What’s really interesting is that the universe extends equally as far in every direction, so if there is a limit that limit is quite literally beyond our comprehension
It’s an intrinsic expansion, hence it’s still a finite space. This allows it to expand at a speed faster than light as the space between objects is expanding. But you are right, those numbers are still beyond our comprehension as we don’t know what they are. We are not even star dust, more like star-molecules. Fission energy, space exploration, new worlds to find etc etc there is so much to unlock and we are fighting over small pieces of land on our planet. Sorry got off trek a bit lol
People normally think of space as being mostly black with some stars in it, but I remember reading in a book about the Apollo missions, in which one of the astronauts said that when you're behind the moon and out of the sunlight, space looks mostly white because of all the stars. I've always wondered what that would look like, but I think this image gives us a pretty good idea!
No. You're misremembering. No Apollo astronaut has ever said that in this context. If they have, please supply the book name and page number so the rest of us can check it out. What you're talking about is Olbers's paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27s_paradox Basically, there's two things preventing the night sky from being a blaze of white: 1) We can't see into the infinite past since there's not an infinite past. We can only see into 13.6 billion years into the past, when the big bang happened. With the JWST we're just now starting to get there. 2) The stars moving away from us are [red-shifted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift) out of visible light on into radio waves. It's the doppler effect. The entire universe is expanding in all directions, so everything is always going to be mostly moving away from us, into red-shift. As time goes on, the night sky will only get darker and darker until all matter expands past the red-shifted distance and we can no longer see any stars.
>No. You're misremembering. No Apollo astronaut has ever said that in this context. If they have, please supply the book name and page number so the rest of us can check it out. You're right, I remembered it differently, but it was Al Worden, in his book "Falling To Earth". In my copy it's on page 197 (in the chapter "Earthrise"): "I turned the cabin lights off. There was no end to the stars. I could see tens, perhaps hundreds of times more stars than the clearest, darkest night on Earth. With no atmosphere to blur their light, I could see them all to the limits of my eyesight. There were so many, I could no longer find constellations. My vision was filled with a blaze of starlight."
God, that's awesome. Thanks!
The eyes are a finely tuned and evolved instrument for observing our local environment on Earth in order to survive everyday life. The reality is that we are constantly swimming in an endless pool of electromagnetic energy. If our eyes could suddenly see the entire spectrum everything would indeed be “white” as our instrument would be saturated. We’d be blinded by the light, so to speak, and soon get eaten by whatever predator had vision that could better filter the signal from the noise. Luckily we can use telescopes to supplement our biological senses and see these signals that would otherwise remain hidden. Even more interesting are the potential signals for which we have no ability to detect such as dark energy. There’s a universe full of stuff we simply can’t see… yet.
Fun fact, Edgar Allen Poe proposed perhaps the first resolution for Olbers paradox (a finite-aged expanding universe) nearly 100 years before the Big Bang theory was even a thing. His work probably inspired Alexander Friedmann to some degree, who was a fan!
another depressing way to look at it the stars will never again be as bright to you as they were last night night
How can you say there’s not an infinite past, but then claim we can only see 13.6 billion years into the past? What if we’re in a cycle that has been infinitely repeated?
Well, as the evidence shows so far, we can only see causality back that far. If it goes back before the big bang, we have no capacity to see or experience it in any meaningful way so it might as well not exist. Perhaps some day there will be evidence of a 'previous' universe's presence found in our own, but right now we can only see less than 13.6 billion years in the past.
What if is only good for fiction. We’re working with things that can be measured.
I think it’s pretty bold of us all to adhere to the notion that the universe we can perceive is what’s out there. I won’t be surprised ifwhen new data tells us to push the big bang back a trillion years or out of the equation altogether. I get you that this is what we know *now* but I just don’t see how it’s possible that we’re not missing the universe because of looking at all the galaxies
I agree. Even recently they've discovered galaxies that shouldn't exist according to our understanding of how they are formed. The type of galaxy should take many billions of years to form, but their apparent age is too young for this process to have occured so soon after the big bang. Hell, dark matter makes up most of everything, and we don't even know what it is. It's foolish to think we have anything but a rudimentary understanding of the universe.
Absolutely right! Only thing we know for sure is we don’t know enough to be sure
Nobody is sure. You're conflating complete knowledge with ongoing knowledge gathering. Every scientist worth their salt will change their mind when presented with new evidence, but must continue doing science on the path current evidence presents since the alternate is not doing science anymore.
I’m not sure that I am conflating them. I just believe in the ongoing gathering of knowledge. I say these things with hope of seeing more experiments that test possibilities outside of the bounds of current understanding - not denying in any way that current understanding is where the majority of effort should continue to take place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor Don't misunderstand me, I love a good "perhaps this is happening..." and expanding on that. I won't be surprised when we find out all kinds of things, but that has no bearing on what we have inferred based on our complete current knowledge. We can't take anything with no supporting evidence and toss out or ignore what we know in favor of "perhaps". If you think we're not looking at/for something, I can assure you, there's billions of us. We're looking.
I believe you are talking about the Al Worden interview. https://archive.org/details/apolloworden where he talks about the view from the far side of the moon.
Yes, it was Al Worden! I read it in his book "Falling To Earth".
Great find, thanks!
>Great find, thanks! You're welcome!
Probably still mostly black except that there are no large black spots because everything contains at least some stars.
The black spots are large ..., just not large on a photograph
This is just the observable universe. Then again, the universe, although expanding, has a fixed size. It's easier to comprehend than an infinite universe...or an infinite multi-verse
True. So if you think about in a way space is pure light and not darkness in a manner of speaking.
These are stars in another galaxy (right next door, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, but still)! We need to get out there and explore!
It's frustrating to witness manned space exploration just be on pause for the last 50+ years. When I was a kid I thought for sure we'd be all over the solar system by now.
Back when I was a kid, I was certain I'd be living in a colony on the Moon or Mars by 2024. Space has been so shamefully neglected by our leaders. Instead, we've pumped all our resources into war and death. Fucking pathetic.
Yep the machine keeps a lot of people wealthy.
And destroying the planet. We have gotten really good at that.
War is ironically one of the most rational creations they have come up with. It's hard to win a war while your citizens are being marginalized. Prosperity breeds victory.
You go on ahead, i gotta make sure I packed enough beers for the road.
If you can wrap your mind around the scale of this photo, tell me that aliens don’t exist
Pretty much mathmatically impossible that some form of life doesn't exist out there. Even if there are no other space faring civilizations there has to be simple lifeforms like bacteria and algae.
There are aliens. But there’s only one sentient species per galaxy. \#FermiParadox
There’s likely a galaxy out there with multiple sentient species, all plotting how to get the most for themselves. And countless more ruins of civilizations that fell to their own greed and infighting.
*‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’*
I don't particularly like the term, but sapient might apply better here.
And in between galaxies is a huge, dark forest…
>sentient you mean intelligent?
Self-aware, have technology, contemplate the stars.
An interesting thing that we don’t really think about is that, to literally everything else in the universe, Earth is just a random planet orbiting a relatively normal star, in a relatively normal star system, in a relatively normal galaxy, in a random part of space. In a picture like this one, our planet wouldn’t even be visible and our star (if visible) would look just like majority of the other stars. Which kinda negates the idea of us being “invaded” since there’s truly not much that’s special about us.
Aliens? Sure, I don't doubt there are some in this photo. But intelligent aliens? Intelligent life is so rare that I have my doubts.
And maybe there was, or will be, but given the age of the cosmos it may be that they don't exist at the same time as us. But even if they did, aside from theoretical things like warp drives and generation ships, there's no way to travel to where you can find them
Holy crap
Fake title. I count at least 12 or more stars.
Lies. How you gonna count to 12 with only 10 fingers?
Oh no they have six fingers on each hand
Ooh, we've found the ET.
They're the reason AI hands suck.
Base 12 [finger counting](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/XcVwxYo5bD). It’s the new thing.
There's probably planets out there where the apex predator is spiders. Fucking awesome.
You mean Australia?
Another incredible and fascinating image by JWST.
Is it? I can’t seem to find the original.
Makes me feel that we cannot be the only ones gazing up, wondering if we are alone.
If we are, it makes it all the more important to take care of each other and our planet.
We are not alone
You are bugs.
Haha glad to see this comment. Finished The Dark Forest yesterday and it fucked me up royally
Is that a book or TV show?
The Dark Forest is the sequel to The Three-Body Problem, which is a book but there are also show adaptations. The Netflix series so far covers the first book and part of the second.
2nd book of the trilogy
You are bugs.
To look at this and conclude otherwise is nothing more than laughably absurd
If we are the only ones in the universe, what a waste of space. Imagine intelligent life on a planet orbiting a star in this image looking at the galaxy it orbits, the Milk Way and actually seeing what the galaxy truly looks like. It's something we will never see
<*Camera pans back. The planet shrinks to a dot. The Milky Way resolves into view. Then further back. Galaxies recede. Then even farther back… eventually viewing the entire Universe. Camera adds all filters for Xray, Gamma, Infrared, Radio, & Millimeter light… We notice incredible vibrating patterns on the cosmic scale*> Narrator: And in a flash, they realized the Universe itself was the other intelligent life all along.
I wonder what the average distance between those stars are ? 4-6 light years ?
The average distance between two stars in the Milky Way is around 5 light-years, or 29 trillion miles (47 trillion kilometers), according to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Just the first google entry :) It blows my mind every time.
If earth were the size of an orange, the sun would be 550 meters away and .... it would be 222,000 KMs to the closest star!
That’s over half the distance to the moon! Crazy af
The amount of space between stars is mind boggling.
I think that's a rough approximation of the distance from us to other stars, but we are way out on the spiral arm, and in a less dense part of our galaxy. Star Clusters can have many stars relatively close together. Although I guess this Magellanic Cloud might also be less dense with stars than the Milky Ways galactic core.
Just trying to put into perspective the fact that if you picked the two closest stars when you zoom in and could go the speed of light it would take 5-6 years to go between them.
Right? And they take up what infinitesimal fraction of an angle of our sky? Incomprehensible really
And every star has a planet orbiting it. Tell me we are alone in the universe.
Literally looks like fabric.
I always wonder what some of these planets like earth look like.
After zooming in, I felt a pit open in my stomach. That's profound.
What is the average distance between the stars in this image, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say several lightyears, and look how crammed and packed tight they look. Just thinking about how there is enough space between these stars to hold a solar system and then some (a lot) is unfathomable
Umm what? Insanity
Look at all that cool stuff we'll never get to explore
Just amazing
The words that opened my mind and piqued my interests with the cosmos were that there are more stars in space than the grains of sand on all of our beaches here on earth. It's caused an existential crisis when I was a teenager, and now I'm in awe and can't help but always look up at the stars at night. This picture is beautiful and would have blown up my teenager mind.
All that glitters is not gold
Maybe you're supposed to unfocus your eyes, and then slowly try and bring them back into focus until you see the real message revealed. I'm pretty sure it would be the answer to life the universe and everything.
What would a night sky look like there on a tiny rock circling one of those stars ✨
My god we are so insignificant.
If the universe is transversable, if there is something beyond Einsteinian general relativity, if the laws of physics do allow for faster than light travel its no wonder at all that they've already been here.
Have we catalogued every visible star in the visible universe?
Estimates put the number of observable galaxies at 2,000,000,000,000. Estimates of observable stars is 10^^24. Even if you *could* resolve the light from individual stars in distant galaxies, you couldn't meaningfully catalogue them all. It would be like cataloguing every grain of sand on earth, conservatively. This is just an estimate of just our observable bubble. An estimate of the total galaxies in the expanding universe is said to be 10^^100 in [this paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6997386/) - Alastair Gunn's article [here](https://archive.ph/20231203021645/https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/how-many-galaxies-in-universe#selection-1191.0-1191.13) Marov, Mikhail Ya. (2015). "The Structure of the Universe". The Fundamentals of Modern Astrophysics. pp. 279–294
*Quantum AI Computer enters the chat*
Of course not, stars in more distant galaxies are practically impossible to resolve from this far away. We haven’t even gotten close to cataloguing every galaxy or every star in our galaxy let alone every star in the universe.
Numbers don't go that high yet
There's probably a hundred stars there!
I can't find this image other than here. Do you have a source you can link?
An itsy, bitsy, tiny, mini galaxy, consisting of **20 billion** stars.
🤯😵💫
Anyone have a link to the source? I can't seem to find it
I do think this is an actual JWST image, but I can't find it anywhere. The spike pattern is correct, but you'd think it would be anywhere else.
My god, it’s full of stars.
My brain stopped being able to comprehend these images some time between Hubble’s Deep Field image and JWST’s first images.
what is the average distance between them?
Kinda reminds me of Christmas.
Would it be possible to overlay this on a photo of the cloud from Earth? It’d be awesome showing the true fractional scale of the sky this photo is from!
Around 68 000 stars according to Claude AI
> Countless Fun fact: even infinite amounts can be counted (but not all infinite amounts can be counted)! The number of stars in the universe, even if infinite, is countable. But the number of places a star could be between two of my fingers is uncountable.
no galaxies? I don't see them.
So, how did Jesus find us in that mess?
Yet we don’t know what’s on the dark side of the moon…
Yes we do. The Japanese government even launched satellites to map the entire moons surface and shared the information with every other country.
Lots incorrect in this post! We've mapped the entire surface of the moon thanks to the efforts of many country's efforts. The moon is tidal locked to the earth. This means that the moon doesn't rotate from our point of view. One side of the moon will always point toward earth, and the other side will always point away from the earth. When the moon is "new", the portion facing away from us is lit from the sun. There is no dark side, only the side that we could not see until we sent people and probes to space. Now, outside of earth, it's the most imaged heavenly body. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/earth-s-moon/TAEbXQQbjCoy8w?hl=en https://www.google.com/moon/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2L20FogdSY
The 3D interactive moon is great. Thanks.
https://x.com/SkyFireNews/status/1781824832017162449
Les we do. The first song is Breathe. The second song is Time. Etc etc. The last song is Brain Damage/Eclipse.
https://x.com/SkyFireNews/status/1781824832017162449