Today, ESA's Euclid space mission reveals its first full-colour images of the cosmos. Never before has a telescope been able to create such razor-sharp astronomical images across such a large patch of the sky, and looking so far into the distant Universe. These five images illustrate Euclid's full potential; they show that the telescope is ready to create the most extensive 3D map of the Universe yet, to uncover some of its hidden secrets.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid/Euclid_s_first_images_the_dazzling_edge_of_darkness
When you play the video clip, some of the images contain thousands of specks of microscopic light, each one a sun or perhaps even a more distant galaxy. It's impossible to fathom that each of these tiny points are millions, or more likely billions of miles apart. When scientists discuss the existence of billions of galaxies, I just give up thinking and my mind races to the nonsensical Star Trek images of spaceships, racing through clusters of objects which even at warp type speeds would surely still pass extremely slowly, given the huge expanses between them. It's even more difficult to imagine that we are in the only Goldilocks belt in the entire universe. I wonder if similarities exist in evolutionary types if they are out there.
Quote from: The Picnic Wasp on November 08, 2023, 05:03:50 PMWhen you play the video clip, some of the images contain thousands of specks of microscopic light, each one a sun or perhaps even a more distant galaxy. It's impossible to fathom that each of these tiny points are millions, or more likely billions of miles apart.
It's a lot (thousands) of billions of miles. The nearest star from my desk here in the East Midlands, not counting the Sun, is 4.24 light years away, or roughly 25 trillion miles.
So that's 25,000 billion miles.
I wonder if humans will ever crack a truly great mystery, such as, what is gravity and how and why did it come about?
Quote from: Slim on November 10, 2023, 12:27:31 PMQuote from: The Picnic Wasp on November 08, 2023, 05:03:50 PMWhen you play the video clip, some of the images contain thousands of specks of microscopic light, each one a sun or perhaps even a more distant galaxy. It's impossible to fathom that each of these tiny points are millions, or more likely billions of miles apart.
It's a lot (thousands) of billions of miles. The nearest star from my desk here in the East Midlands, not counting the Sun, is 4.24 light years away, or roughly 25 trillion miles.
So that's 25,000 billion miles.
Just watched a YouTube video where the author, comparing our sun to the size of a golf ball, drove from England to Spain to indicate the distance of our sun to the nearest star in our galaxy. More than 700 miles away. Unimaginable.
Quote from: The Picnic Wasp on November 11, 2023, 08:44:12 PMJust watched a YouTube video where the author, comparing our sun to the size of a golf ball, drove from England to Spain to indicate the distance of our sun to the nearest star in our galaxy. More than 700 miles away. Unimaginable.
Years ago I tried to make a sort of thought experiment scale model of the Solar System and the nearest star on a scale by which the Sun was a size of a football. I posted it on the old rushmessageboard.com; unfortunately it was lost when the site database got corrupted and underwent a Year Zero.
Believe it or not (just looked this up) there's a star visible to the
naked eye that's 16,308 light years away. So on that same scale with Proxima Centauri 700 miles away, it would be about 2.7 million miles away, or about 11 times further away than the Moon (in real life).