Experimental Blog #130

Quotations from "Chasing Hubble's Shadows" - The Search for Galaxies at the Edge of Time by Jeff Kanipe

"If fireflies flickered in the dark recesses of the moon, we could see them with the Hubble telescope."

"Some of the galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field ... lie more than 12 billion light-years away. But that immensity also represents a span of time - of more than 12 billion years in the past ... "

However, it is also true that:
"Observations during the mid-twentieth century showed that, on average, all galaxies in the nearby universe, including our own, are very old. Some of the Milky Way's oldest stars, which congregate in dense spherical systems called globular clusters, are about 13 billion years old, almost as old as the universe itself..."

"Because the universe is expanding, light coming from sources at progressively greater cosmological distances is stretched .. toward longer, or redder, wavelengths. The greater the redshift, the more distant the object and the farther back in time it lies."

"The fact that astronomers can stand before their colleagues today and present findings about galaxies that existed in a universe barely 700 million years old speaks volumes about how much more of the cosmic landscape has been assayed compared with the tracts of the last decade of the last century."

"The cosmological principle states that the universe looks basically the same in all directions from any location."

"One of the ironies of the current state of cosmology is that more is known about the universe when it was 300,000 years old than when it was 1 billion years old."