The 1995 Hubble photo that changed astronomy

Since the Hubble Space Telescope went into orbit back in April 1990, it has sent back a ton of incredible photos. Each has its own story, but one of Hubble’s greatest images is this one, from 1995. This is a snapshot of nearly the entire history of the universe - and the first of its kind. The Hubble Deep Field is an unusual image that came from an unusual process. Typically astronomers apply to use Hubble to look at a particular known object. “You want to study a star? Okay you know what star you’re going to study. You point the telescope at that star.” That’s Robert Williams. He became the director of the telescope in 1993. It was his decision to create the Deep Field image by pointing the telescope at nothing in particular. “What we're doing basically was just the opposite — we're trying to find a sort of indiscriminate area of sky where no observation had been made before.” They wanted to test how well Hubble could survey very distant galaxies. But they didn’t know what they’d see. And It wasn’t a great time to be trying new things. “After spending 2 billion dollars for 12 years, to have this kind of unexpected, very large mistake take place..” The Hubble team was still repairing the reputation of the telescope after a flaw in the main mirror produced blurry images for nearly three years. “We were the brunt of jokes and the newspapers, political cartoons you know Johnny Carson show. NASA was being made fun of for having made such a monumental screw up of such an expensive project.” NASA sent astronauts on a 5-day mission to install a module that would fix the problem. And it worked. So Williams’ team spent 1995 planning the deep field observation. For one thing, they had to decide where to point the telescope. The goal was to see far beyond our galaxy, so the spot needed to be away from the galactic plane of the Milky Way and away from any known large galaxy clusters. They didn’t want anything bright to block the view. And to get continuous observations, it needed to be a location that wouldn’t be obscured when Hubble went around Earth, as it does every hour and a half or so. They settled on a region just above the big dipper -- a dark, unremarkable, peephole into the universe. The field of view was extremely narrow. Astronomers measure the apparent size of objects in the sky in angular degrees, and a degree can be divided into 60 arcminutes. From Earth, the moon is about half a degree across, around 30 arcminutes. But the area that Hubble photographed was just 2.6 arcminutes across. “A little larger than a pinhead at arm's length. So it’s a teeny patch of sky.” The observations began on December, 18, 1995, collecting 4 different wavelengths of light. And over the next 10 days the telescope took 342 images of that teeny patch of sky. “We were relieved that we are getting good data but we had to keep adding it up and so it wasn't until ten days that we realized oh, we really got something.” There are a few nearby stars in the image but pretty much all the other objects here, including these tiny blue dots -- they’re galaxies. The light from these different galaxies has been traveling for vastly different amounts of time so the furthest galaxies are shown pretty early in their evolution, more than 12 billion years ago. That’s just a billion and a half years after the big bang. It’s as if you could point a telescope across the earth and actually photograph ancient Egypt, with a neanderthal in the background and then further back there’s a dinosaur. The research team sampled another tiny spot two years later, this time in the southern sky. “We wanted to know okay then we got one spot of this you never know maybe it was some weird spot and so we thought it was important to repeat the observation.” The datasets boosted estimates of the total number of galaxies. They allowed researchers to track the history of star formation through the universe. And they helped confirm the bottom-up theory of galaxy formation, by revealing galaxies that are small and irregular early in their evolution. But one of the most important legacies of the Hubble Deep Field is how it changed the culture of astronomy. “Until this time astronomy had a history of people taking the data and keeping it to themselves until they had fully analyzed it after all this was intellectual property.” Instead of hoarding the discoveries embedded in the dataset, Williams and his team formatted and released it immediately to the wider scientific community. It’s been cited in hundreds of papers. “Nowadays it is so much more common for people to take interesting observations and make the data available to the public even though they might have a right to keep it for a certain period of time to themselves.” Thanks to servicing missions that installed more advanced cameras, Hubble has since made even deeper deep field images, and those data too, were released to the public. “I think it it moves forward the march of human understanding human knowledge tremendously and the Hubble deep field did that.”

Channel: Vox

Views: 6,349,677

Rating: 4.885489 out of 5

Keywords: vox, science, hubble telescope, hubble, space, deep field, hubble deep field, Robert Williams, astronomy, galaxies, cosmology, big bang, outer space, nasa, milky way, hubble space telescope, hubble photos, hubble pictures, hubble photo, photos of outer space, vox.com, observatory, joss fong, how the hubble telescope works

Id: 95Tc0Rk2cNg

Length: 5min 27sec (327 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Tuokaerf10]

I vividly remember one of my science teacher showing us the Deep Field South picture shortly after its release in the late 90's. I always had an interest in space, and "knew" the universe was a big place, but it wasn't until seeing that picture I had a very emotional reaction to that knowledge. I'll never forget that feeling, and put billions of years and lightyears into context for me.

[u/muffley]

The most emotional reaction I've had to a video is this of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3d. The first bit is explanation of the photo and how they know the z-axis point of each object in the picture, and the 3d itself starts at 2:53.

[u/fusslessness]

James webb telescope will launch in october 2018 and it is supposed to be 100 times more powerful than hubble. im exited af for the images from this. http://jwst.nasa.gov/comparison.html

[u/Im-Gonna_Wreck-It]

Slightly relevant, Eric Whitacre was inspired by the Deep Field image and composed this piece. Deep Field by Eric whitacre with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, The BBC Singers & The BBC Symphony Chorus.

[u/hymness1]

An area no bigger than a pin head at arms lenght...

Absolutely incredible... And sad... I don't know why...

[u/Biff666Mitchell]

I'm a little new to this sub, and this was amazing. Anyone else have some good documentaries, or short 5 min videos like this that are a good watch? I've seen the hubble movie leo narrated a million times and love it.

[u/Rocky_Road_To_Dublin]

Videos like this always make me feel so small and insignificant. But then I realize that I am a disappointment to almost everybody I know and that helps me feel a bit better.

Vox makes some damn good videos!

[u/markevens]

Its hard to say how impactful the deep field images were.

Not quite on the same level as Edwin Hubble's initial discovery of other galaxies in an expanding universe, but certainly close.

[u/DrKevin00]

Everyone is talking about their most significant science moments. Mine by far was seeing the space shuttle at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They showed a video about the design of it and at the end the screen lifts to be semi transparent revealing the actual shuttle behind it. I swear to god tears came to my eyes.