Radar
May 31st, 2007, 02:32 AM
The lay person probably wouldn't give this image a second glance, poor things.
You can tell from this image that we are looking back in time billions of years. The mature spiral shape that galaxies have today is only just kicking in here.
The photons that Hubble caught have been travelling for billions of years just to make this photo possible. These galaxies would look nothing like what they do in this photo. By now they have changed size, position, colour, merged etc. Maybe even burnt out, but we won't know how they look today for another few billion years.
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2004/21/images/a/formats/web.jpg
You can tell from this image that we are looking back in time billions of years. The mature spiral shape that galaxies have today is only just kicking in here.
The photons that Hubble caught have been travelling for billions of years just to make this photo possible. These galaxies would look nothing like what they do in this photo. By now they have changed size, position, colour, merged etc. Maybe even burnt out, but we won't know how they look today for another few billion years.
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2004/21/images/a/formats/web.jpg