Hubble Deep Field

You know, we had to...

Tomas will tell you, we have, uh, one scene called the Galaxy Room, which is modeled on the Hubble Deep Field image, where the guests can walk around and touch thousands of galaxies.

And they can basically stand inside of the Deep Field image.

And it sounded like a great creative idea that I had, and I was really proud of myself, and then I handed it to Tomas, and it turned into, like, three months of, uh, back and forth work with-

The story of Hubble is especially important to me because it reset our understanding of the scale of the universe.

With the Hubble Deep Field image, we were able to estimate the number of galaxies in the known universe.

And the answer blew our minds.

Our series tells the story of how Hubble was designed and launched only to discover a devastating flaw and the daring mission to repair it.

[singing] If you've only learned one awesome thing about astronomy and the gigantic-ness of the universe, it's probably that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, space itself is expanding, and our observable universe at 93 billion light years across is accelerating in its expansion such that someday all the objects in the universe might eventually fly apart, never to return.

But the second thing you might have learned about is the Hubble Deep Field.

If you have heard of the Hubble Deep Field, I apologize, but I have to remind you how awesome it is.

If you haven't heard of the Hubble Deep Field, it's basically this.

In 1995, scientists chose the darkest patch of the night sky and focused the Hubble Space Telescope there for 10 consecutive days.

The patch was only 2.5 arc minutes across.

That is 2.5 arc minutes across.

If you filled the entire sky with these squares, you would need 23,800,000 of them.

[laughs]

Uh, like, uh, sometimes when I'm feeling shitty or just feeling confused, I'll go look at that like, uh, that Hubble Deep Field image of Andromeda.

Have you seen it?

No, I haven't.

Per the press release, they found that for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star, a civilization producing the same amount of nitrogen dioxide as ours could be detected up to about thirty light-years away with about four hundred hours of observing time using a future large NASA telescope observing at visible wavelengths.

This is a substantial but not unprecedented amount of time, as NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took a similar amount of time for the famous Deep Field observations.

Additionally, stars that are cooler and more common than our Sun, what we call K- and M-type stars or red dwarfs, will actually produce a more easily detected nitrogen dioxide signal.

Since those stars are more abundant, we have more chances for finding technosignatures from planets in orbit around them.

Again, you see, for flagship telescopes like Webb, a small fraction of its total time can be allocated at the director's discretion, known as DDT.

And it's from such DDTs that we got the awesome Hubble Deep Field, the radical notion to stare at the emptiest patch of the sky that we could find and simply just see what it might look like in high resolution.

And here too, the director has stepped in and decided to spend 500 hours of precious telescope time to investigate whether rocky planets straddling that cosmic shoreline have atmospheres or not.

Link down below in the description for this program.

While it had been hypothesized in the early 1960s that black holes would be found at the centers of some galaxies, and astronomers in the 1980s identified a number of good black hole candidates, work conducted with Hubble shows that black holes are probably common to the centers of all galaxies.

A unique window on the universe enabled by Hubble are the Hubble Deep Field, Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and Hubble Extreme Deep Field images, which used Hubble's unmatched sensitivity at visible wavelengths to create images of small patches of sky that are the deepest ever obtained at optical wavelengths.

The images reveal galaxies billions of light-years away, thereby providing information about the early universe, and have accordingly generated a wealth of scientific papers.

The collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 was fortuitously timed for astronomers, coming just a few months after Servicing Mission 1 had restored Hubble's optical performance.