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A Pool of Distant Galaxies – the deepest ultraviolet image of the Universe yet

What do you do when you want to see back in time? You look at the sky…

Sometimes it takes billions of years for the light from far objects to reach Earth. The light from some of the blinking dots you see in the sky has left them when there was no life on Earth. So, many years later you look at the sky and it is a window to the past. The scale of the universe and the time it takes for the light to travel so far makes me think that something with our perception of what time is, is terribly wrong. It feels like what we call time is actually a manifestation of something else.

I came across this image of deep space, released by ESA (European Space Agency). It is the deepest ground-based Ultraviolet image of the Universe ever obtained! Wow!

To get the photo, they had to pick a very dark area of the sky - where there are no closer object to interfere. It was a black spot.

Just look at the image - the place is full of ‘life’… or rather was. The Universe was just 2 billion years old when the light has left these stars and galaxies on its way to Earth. The estimated age of the universe is ~14 billion years. The solar system was formed ~5 billion years ago. So, we see how those galaxies looked when our solar system was just a nebula, a cloud of dust in space.

It looks like we live in a bubble of present time ‘reality’ and everything else around us is the past. The farther you look from this bubble, further back in time you see. The only factor in this ‘time machine’ is the size of the space. So, size does matter after all. It matters so much that we can see 12 billion years back in time.

If we go just little further (2 b. years more) we will reach an event horizon of the observable universe. The light from those objects is still traveling towards Earth, so there will not be much to see - another bubble this time of the observable universe.

Our fundamental laws of physics are based on observation and the presumption that an object is were it seems to be. For most of our daily life on Earth that is correct, not so on cosmic scale. The real universe is probably very different place now.

The human life is so short compared to the age of the universe we are not even on the radar. We are within the margins of the statistical error. We are lost in time.

Our life is an illusion - just a touch away…