Friday, October 07, 2005

So. There's an awful lot of (star) stuff out there...


Apparently, all the stuff that we can see or detect out there - Stars, Planets, Galaxies, Nebulae, Pulsars, Quasars, Black Holes, Brown Dwarfs, Globular Clustars & Praline Suprises, well that's only about 5% of the stuff (matter) that we can actully see or detect out there. It's an oft repeated fact that there are more galaxies in our particular Universe than there are grains of sand in all the desserts & beaches Earth. Yet even with all this stuff out there astronomers know for sure (they have robust evidence from various astronomical measurements that there's actually twenty times more stuff out there that we can't directly observe or detect at present from here on The Good Earth. This other 95% of what comprises the total Matter in The Universe is made up of more exotic stuff (Dark Matter, Dark Energy & countless acres of Higgs Fields). This Hubble "Deep Field" image (which took one million seconds exposure time to capture, that's about a week going "snap!" Indeed, the original jpeg image I downloaded, which was already significantly compressed from the RAW Hubble image was still over 64 megabytes!). Every point of light you see in this image is a galaxy not a star! You can make out literally tens of thousands of galaxies in that full res file image. All these galaxies were photographed from an area of space that from earth would not even cover the moon as seen with the naked eye from Earth. Well let's just say that given all that, I am actually twenty times more awestruck than you can actually see or detect...

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