The use of that discretionary time was a courageous thing,” he says.īut there was more. He was among the scientists who initially thought the deep field was a bad idea. “When the galaxies were young, they were very irregular - they were having collisions, they were erupting, they were having adolescent outbursts,” says Robert Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “With this achievement, the estimated number of galaxies in the universe had multiplied enormously - to 50 billion, five times more than previously expected,” wrote John Noble Wilford in The New York Times in The New York Times. And some of the older galaxies – those distant, faint ones that were supposedly impossible for Hubble to see – looked really, really different. Spiral, elliptical, irregular – red, white, blue, and yellow – the smudges of light that leapt from the final composite image cracked the universe in ways scientists never could have imagined. More than 3,000 of them came spilling out, some roughly 12 billion years old. It turned out that “nothing” was actually stuffed with of galaxies. The images were processed and combined, then colored, and 17 days later, released to the public. ![]() In total, the telescope took 342 pictures of the region, each of which was exposed for between 25 and 45 minutes. 18 and 28, Hubble stared at a patch of sky near the Big Dipper’s handle that was only about 1/30th as wide as the full moon. So, with his job perhaps on the line, Williams went off, put together a small team of post-docs, and did exactly as he’d planned. “And I was at a point in my career where I said, “If it’s that bad, I’ll resign. “Scientific discovery requires risk,” Williams says. And to him, the potential observations were so important and so fundamental for understanding how the universe evolved that the experiment was a no-brainer, consequences be damned. Wiliams suspected the billion light-year stare might capture eons of galactic evolution in a single frame and uncover some of the faintest, farthest galaxies ever seen. “But as director, I had 10 percent of the telescope time, and I could do what I wanted.” “The telescope allocation committee would never have approved such a long, risky project,” he explains. As director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he had a certain amount of Hubble’s time at his personal disposal. And, to be honest, it didn’t really matter how much his colleagues protested. And now, finally, it was time to start erasing the frustrations of Hubble’s early years.Įxcept that staring at nothing and coming up empty didn’t seem like the best way to do that.īut Williams was undeterred. After the fix, the previously blind eye in the sky could finally see stars as more than blurred points of light. Not much earlier, astronauts had dragged Hubble into the cargo bay of the space shuttle Endeavour and corrected a disastrous flaw in the prized telescope’s vision. Perceptions of the project, which had already cost multiple billions of dollars, were pretty dismal. Plus, another Hubble failure would be a public relations nightmare. People would kill for that amount of time with the sharpest tool in the shed, they said, and besides - no way would the distant galaxies Williams hoped to see be bright enough for Hubble to detect. It was a terrible idea, his colleagues told him, and a waste of valuable telescope time. It does not store any personal data.In 1995, astronomer Bob Williams wanted to point the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of sky filled with absolutely nothing remarkable. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. ![]() The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". ![]() This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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