Reblog for the Hitchhikers Guide reference, and for anyone who belives there is a guy with a white beard on a cloud who made all this.Hubble Goes Deep, Finds Farthest Galaxies Yet | Wired Science | Wired.com
If you read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you might remember the bit in which Zaphod lands on Frogstar World B and steps into the Total Perspective Vortex, which is supposed to blow his mind, except he is in an alternate dimension in which he is the most important thing in the universe, so he doesn’t know what the big deal is.
Here is your perspective:
The galaxies in this photograph are 12 to 13 billion light-years away. That means that this isn’t how they look now. This is how they look 12 to 13 billion years ago. We won’t see what they look like “now” until 12 to 13 billion years from now, at which point many of them will not even exist, which we won’t know for another 12 to 13 billion years. And if you haven’t heard, this planet is scheduled to be a smoldering ember in 4 billion years.
12 billion light-years is somewhere in the range of tens of quintillions of miles. You can’t count that high even if you have your whole life to do it.
Brain hurt yet?
