Hubble Site

http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/hubbles_universe_unfiltered/blogs/a-deep-view-down-broadway

HUBBLESITE


HUBBLE'S UNIVERSE unfiltered

with Dr. Frank Summers


October 14, 2016

A Deep View Down Broadway

by Frank Summers

[Note: this blog post also appears on the Frontier Fields blog.]

One of the more philosophical concepts that astronomers have to deal with on an everyday basis is the commingling of space and time in astronomical images.

The underlying idea is straightforward. The speed of light is finite. Light from a star or nebula or galaxy takes a measurable amount of time to cross the space between it and us. Hence, the light we see now left that object at some previous time. We view astronomical objects as they were in the past. As I like to say, looking out in space is also looking back in time.

The implications of this maxim are considerable, especially in dealing with the deep field images from Hubble (see the accompanying image of the Abell 2744 Parallel deep field). Such images contain a wonderful assortment of galaxies, with a few stars here and there. Each object is at a different position in space, both in the two-dimensional sense of a different position within the image and in the three-dimensional sense of being at a different distance from Earth. Further, objects at different distances are seen at different times in the past. Hence, astronomers must examine these deep field images in four-dimensional space-time.

Tackling the expanse of space and time in these images can be mind-boggling. We’ll start with the stars, which are easier to understand. All the stars are local, within our Milky Way galaxy. These stars are generally hundreds to thousands of light-years away. The light we observe today might have left the star while the pyramids of Egypt were being built. Because stars don’t change appreciably on scales of thousands of years, stars in deep fields are just like stars in other astronomical images.

The galaxies, however, stretch much farther into space. The nearest are many millions of light-years away, while the most distant are around ten billion light-years away. Galaxies don’t change much on million-year timescales. For example, it takes over 200 million years for our Sun to orbit once within our galaxy. Even though the light may have left a galaxy when dinosaurs first started to dominate our planet, the same galaxy would look similar today. Thus, the nearby galaxies in these images are comparable to local galaxies.

Given billions of years, however, galaxies do change, and these deep field images provide compelling evidence. Distant galaxies do not have the standard spiral and elliptical shapes. They are often elongated, have bright spots of star formation, and are much smaller in size. We see galaxies as they were before the Sun, Earth, and the solar system formed. We study the development of galaxies over time to see how they form and grow. The perplexing point is that, for any given galaxy in the image, there is no distinct visual indicator of its distance in space or time. The layers of the universe are jumbled together across the image, and it is a grand puzzle of cosmology to sort them out.

The usual method to determine distances, and therefore times, is to measure the cosmological redshift of each galaxy. That concept has been discussed in a Frontier Fields blog post by Dr. Brandon Lawton: “Light Detectives: Using Color to Estimate Distance”. Thus, I’d like to take this essay in a different direction.

The Manhattan Deep Field

When discussing the cosmic mixture of space-time with an artist visiting from Spain, I happened upon a novel idea for a human-centric analogy.

Imagine you are in New York City, specifically Times Square in Manhattan. You look down Broadway to the southern end of the island about 4 miles away. If the speed of light were extremely slow, traveling only one mile per century, what would you see?

Each mile down Broadway would represent one hundred years of New York’s history. Each block would be 5 to 10 years earlier in the development of the metropolis.

A quarter of a mile away, the southern end of the theater district would appear as it did in the early 1990s when “Miss Saigon” came to Broadway. Only a few blocks farther would be the disco era and the civil unrest of the 1960s, then the World War II years and the Great Depression.

The Empire State Building, about a mile away, would vanish, as it was not built until 1931. At a similar distance, Madison Square Garden would be seen hosting heavyweight boxing matches in its original building, before the demolition and re-construction in the late 1920s.

Progressing another mile down Broadway to Union Square would travel back past the Civil War, Tammany Hall politics, economic growth fostered by the Erie Canal, and Alexander Hamilton’s original run on the New York stage.

The mile beyond to the Soho district progresses through the times of New York as the capital of the United States, the Revolutionary War, the founding of Columbia University, and the importation of slaves by the Dutch West Indies Company.

The final mile to Battery Park leads through the colonial era alternately dominated by Dutch or English foreign powers, past the garrison of Fort Amsterdam, to the island’s Native American roots and the initial explorations by Henry Hudson.

A “slow speed of light” view from Times Square would lay out the entire history of the city of New York in a single view. The comingling of space and time would make it the historian’s exceptional equivalent of the astronomer’s standard observation: a deep view down Broadway.

This idea of a time-warped view of New York provides an analogy to what Hubble uncovers: the history of galaxies compressed and jumbled within each deep field. Perhaps it can help you to look at these images from that requisite four-dimensional perspective. These deep field images are truly a trip down memory lane.










https://frontierfields.org/2016/10/14/a-deep-view-down-broadway/

Frontier Fields

PUSHING THE LIMITS OF THE HUBBLE TELESCOPE

October 14, 2016 Dr. Frank Summers

A Deep View Down Broadway

[Note: this blog post also appears on the Hubble’s Universe Unfiltered blog.]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: - posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 6:52 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Wednesday 12 October 2016 - http://hvom.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-hardest-button-to-button.html


The Hardest Button To Button



Damnit I know I wrote about this before in my journal. I've already spent more than a half hour trying to find it again. I don't know.

I wrote once about my theories of that "time goggle" from that November 2006 Denzel Washington film "Deja Vu".

I was writing about how I wrote in my personal journal when I worked at Microsoft about the confluence of that White Stripes music video and my earlier notes in my journal about my theories of a device that allowed a person to see beyond the visual range of normal time. That notion was illustrated in the 2006 film with the goggles Denzel Washington was wearing as he was driving.

I wrote about how the goggles had a resolution setting. I forget now the precise details I wrote but the same details would be about the number of pencils a person would see rolling across a desk according to the resolution setting and depending on such variables as the rotation rate of the pencil across the desk. There would be only one pencil rolling across the desk but if the resolution setting was set to the proper setting and if the pencil was set in motion then the observer would possibly see ten pencils, for example.

Might be in my pre-2/3/2006 journal. But yet I cannot shake the feeling there is reference somewhere in my journal from 2/3/2006 to present. But that is either not true or I cannot now sitting here recall specific enough words to find it again in this MASSIVE blog.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 12 October 2016 except ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: - posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 6:52 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Wednesday 12 October 2016 - http://hvom.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-hardest-button-to-button.html


http://www.azlyrics.com/w/whitestripes.html

AZ

album: "Elephant" (2003)


http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/whitestripes/thehardestbuttontobutton.html

AZ

THE WHITE STRIPES

"The Hardest Button To Button"

We started living in an old house
My ma gave birth and we were checking it out
It was a baby boy
So we bought him a toy
It was a ray gun
And it was 1981

We named him 'Baby'
He had a toothache
He started crying
It sounded like an earthquake
It didn't last long
Because I stopped it
I grabbed a rag doll
And stuck some little pins in it

Now we're a family
And we're alright now
We got money and a little place
To fight now
We don't know you
And we don't owe you
But if you see us around
I got something else to show you

Now it's easy when you don't know better
You think it's sleazy?
Then put it in a short letter
We keep warm
But there's just something wrong with you
Just feel that you're the hardest little button to button

I had opinions
That didn't matter
I had a brain
That felt like pancake batter
I got a backyard
With nothing in it
Except a stick
A dog
And a box with something in it

The hardest button to button [x12]


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 12 October 2016 except ends]



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 10:16 AM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Friday 25 November 2016