The artist and the machine – Michael Nielsen

In September of 2012, a team of scientists released a photograph showing the most distant parts of the Universe ever seen by any human being. They obtained the photograph by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a single tiny patch of sky, gradually building up an image over a total of 23 days of observation. It’s an otherwise undistinguished patch of sky, within the little-known constellation Fornax. It’s less than one hundredth the size of the full moon, and appears totally empty to the naked eye. Here’s what’s seen with the Hubble Telescope: This image is known as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. It contains 5,500 galaxies, each of which, in turn, contains billions of stars. This region of sky ordinarily looks empty because these galaxies are far too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Some of the galaxies are more than 13 billion light years away. We are seeing them as they were just a few hundred million years after the big bang, near the dawn of time. If you have the eyes to see, t

In September of 2012, a team of scientists released a photograph showing the most distant parts of the Universe ever seen by any human being. They obtained the photograph by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a single tiny patch of sky, gradually building up an image over a total of 23 days of observation. It’s an otherwise undistinguished patch of sky, within the little-known constellation Fornax. It’s less than one hundredth the size of the full moon, and appears totally empty to the naked eye. Here’s what’s seen with the Hubble Telescope: This image is known as the Hubble Extreme Deep F