Deep Field

Or, Why the TheoCons Hate the Hubble

A little information courtesy of the Wikipedia:

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region of the sky, based on the results of a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 144 arcseconds across, equivalent in angular size to a tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres, lying in the constellation Ursa Major. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.

The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known. By revealing such large numbers of very young galaxies, the HDF has become a landmark image in the study of the early universe, and it has been the source of almost 400 scientific papers since it was created.

Three years after the HDF observations were taken, a region in the south celestial hemisphere was imaged in a similar way and named the Hubble Deep Field South. The similarities between the two regions strengthened the belief that the universe is uniform over large scales and that the Earth occupies a typical region in the universe (the cosmological principle). In 2004 a deeper image, known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, was constructed from a total of eleven days of observations.

The field selected for the observations needed to fulfil several criteria. It had to be at a high galactic latitude, because dust and obscuring matter in the plane of the Milky Way's disc prevents observations of distant galaxies. The target field had to avoid known bright sources of visible light (such as foreground stars), and infrared, ultraviolet and X-ray emissions, to facilitate later studies at many wavelengths of the objects in the deep field, and also needed to be in a region with a low background infrared 'cirrus', the diffuse, wispy infrared emission believed to be caused by warm dust grains in cool clouds of hydrogen gas (H I regions)...

The field that was eventually selected is located at a right ascension of 12h 36m 49.4s and a declination of +62° 12′ 48″[1]...

Images of the target area in the chosen filters were taken over ten consecutive days, during which Hubble orbited the Earth about 150 times. The total exposure times at each wavelength were 42.7 hours (300 nm), 33.5 hours (450 nm), 30.3 hours (606 nm) and 34.3 hours (814 nm), divided into 342 individual exposures to prevent significant damage to individual images by cosmic rays, which cause bright streaks to appear when they strike CCD detectors...

The final images revealed a plethora of distant, faint galaxies. About 3,000 distinct galaxies could be identified in the images, with both irregular and spiral galaxies clearly visible, although some galaxies in the field are only a few pixels across. In all, the HDF is thought to contain fewer than ten galactic foreground stars; by far the majority of objects in the field are distant galaxies.

There are about fifty blue point-like objects in the HDF. Many seem to be associated with nearby galaxies, which together form chains and arcs: these are likely to be regions of intense star formation. Others may be distant quasars. Astronomers initially ruled out the possibility that some of the point-like objects are white dwarfs, because they are too blue to be consistent with theories of white dwarf evolution prevalent at the time. However, more recent work has found that many white dwarfs become bluer as they age, lending support to the idea that the HDF might contain white dwarfs [2].

The HDF data provided extremely rich material for cosmologists to analyse and as of 2005, almost 400 papers based on the HDF have appeared in the astronomical literature. One of the most fundamental findings was the discovery of large numbers of galaxies with high redshift values.

As the universe expands, more distant objects recede from the Earth faster, in what is called the Hubble Flow. The light from very distant galaxies is significantly affected by doppler shifting, which reddens the radiation that we receive from them. While quasars with high redshifts were known, very few galaxies with redshifts greater than 1 were known before the HDF images were produced. The HDF, however, contained many galaxies with redshifts as high as 6, corresponding to distances of about 12 billion light years [3]. (Due to redshift the most distant objects in the HDF are not actually visible in the Hubble images; they can only be detected in images of the HDF taken at longer wavelengths by ground-based telescopes.)

The HDF galaxies contained a considerably larger proportion of disturbed and irregular galaxies than the local universe; galaxy collisions and mergers were more common in the young universe as it was much smaller than today. It is believed that giant elliptical galaxies form when spirals and irregular galaxies collide.

The wealth of galaxies at different stages of their evolution also allowed astronomers to estimate the variation in the rate of star formation over the lifetime of the universe. While estimates of the redshifts of HDF galaxies are somewhat crude, astronomers believe that star formation was occurring at its maximum rate 8–10 billion years ago, and has decreased by a factor of about 10 since then [4].

Another important result from the HDF was the very small number of foreground stars present. For years astronomers had been puzzling over the nature of so-called dark matter, mass which seems to be undetectable but which observations implied made up about 90% of the mass of the universe. One theory was that dark matter might consist of Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) — faint but massive objects such as red dwarfs and planets in the outer regions of galaxies. The HDF showed, however, that there were not significant numbers of red dwarfs in the outer parts of our galaxy...

References

[1] Williams RE et al. (1996), The Hubble Deep Field: Observations, data reduction, and galaxy photometry, Astronomical Journal, 112:1335
[2] Ferguson HC (2000), The Hubble Deep Fields, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems IX, ASP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 216, N Manset, C Veillet, and D Crabtree (eds). Astronomical Society of the Pacific, ISBN 1-58381-047-1, p.395
[3] Hansen BMS (1998), Observational signatures of old white dwarfs, 19th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology, J Paul, T Montmerle, and E Aubourg (eds)
[4] Hornschemeier A et al.. (2000), X-Ray sources in the Hubble Deep Field detected by Chandra, Astrophysical Journal, 541:49–53
[5] Connolly AJ et al. (1997),. The evolution of the global star formation history as measured from the Hubble Deep Field, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 486:L11


More on how they do it here.

More on what they see here and what they zoom in on in the .mpeg here.

The universe is infinitely larger and older than we can imagine. The known age of the universe and its size are limited by the distances we can observe. Or understand. This fact, in and of itself, gives us no information about what any Creator might be. But it strongly suggests any Creator isn't the jealous, petty, small fantasy overtly worshipped by the TheoCons who would rule us all.