Monday, March 1, 2010

Space and Time Warps visible in Hubble Photo?

I've had a 13 billion year old image of galaxies taken by the Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) as my desktop image for some time now. It seems to me that what I am seeing is not as many galaxies as it seems, but the same galaxies seen duplicated and at different times by gravitational lensing by black holes, dark matter, or something else.

Are there any astrophysicists out there that can tell me why my theory may be true or false?
This is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The faintest and reddest objects (left inset) in the image are galaxies that correspond to "look-back times" of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago. No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs. These galaxies are much smaller than the Milky Way galaxy and have populations of stars that are intrinsically very blue. This may indicate the galaxies are so primordial that they are deficient in heavier elements, and as a result, are quite free of the dust that reddens light through scattering.

The image was taken with Hubble's newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which collects light from near-infrared wavelengths and therefore looks even deeper into the universe. The light from very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe.

Hubble's WFC3 took this image in late August 2009 during a total of four days of pointing for 173,000 seconds of exposure time. Infrared light is invisible and therefore does not have colors that can be perceived by the human eye. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium, and long near-infrared wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; and red, 1.6 microns). The representation is "natural" in that blue objects appear blue and red objects look red. The faintest objects are about one-billionth as bright as can be seen with the naked eye. The galaxy distances are estimated from the infrared colors of their light.

These Hubble observations are trailblazing a path for Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will look even farther into the universe than Hubble, at infrared wavelengths. The JWST is planned to be launched in 2014.

3 comments:

Danny said...

I'm not an astrophysicist, but I am a graphics artist. What I think you're seeing is called clone stamping in photoshop. Perhaps there was some patchwork done on this image. I too had that image as a wallpaper a while back and I remember thinking it was touched up. But just a theory.

Xeno said...

My mind starts moving the galaxies around, like they are a big puzzle, and I feel there is a solution ... but I don't have the visualization power to do it.

Some groups galaxies seem repeated but the patterns are not exact like they would be with a Photoshop stamp job. Also the colors are different.

With a good image warping tool I'd try to create a 3 or 4 D model from this flat image connecting the objects that seem the same. This would, I think, show things which are missing.

I see distortion bubbles of different sizes creating overlapping rings of galaxies.

Cole said...

Yeah, or maybe the original image wasn't square, and they had to copy things to make it square. If you look closely, there appears to be a circular shape made by the galaxies, and then more scant galaxies in the corners.