08/18/2026
It is one great big universe!!
Namaste Yβall
This image looks like static on an old television set. It's actually a photograph of nearly the entire observable universe, packed into a patch of sky smaller than a grain of sand held at arm's length.
This is Hubble's Ultra Deep Field, built by aiming the telescope at one of the darkest, emptiest looking patches of sky astronomers could find, a spot deliberately chosen because it had almost nothing bright in it to get in the way. Hubble stared at that single point for roughly 11 days total, spread across hundreds of orbits, stacking 800 separate exposures on top of each other until faint light that had been traveling for billions of years finally became visible. Imagine leaving a camera shutter open for over a week straight just to catch a whisper of light too faint for any single glance to register.
The "not a star, it's a galaxy" claim mostly holds up, with one small asterisk worth knowing. Nearly everything scattered across this frame really is a galaxy, some containing hundreds of billions of stars each, seen as they looked when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. But astronomers deliberately left in a handful of actual foreground stars from our own galaxy too, and you can spot them by the four pointed spikes of light radiating out from their centers, an optical artifact created by the telescope's own support structure. Everything without those spikes is a galaxy. The rare object with spikes is just one of our own local neighbors, doing something no distant galaxy in this photo can, shining nearby enough to blind the telescope a little.
Which is harder to wrap your head around, the number of galaxies in this one image, or how empty this patch of sky looked before Hubble stared at it?
Source: NASA and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field team, via science dot nasa dot gov
