WEBVTT FILE

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:16.345
In 1995, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope
spent 10 days looking at a
seemingly empty pinpoint in the sky.

2
00:00:16.345 --> 00:00:23.189
Instead of darkness, what Hubble found
changed our understanding of the universe...

3
00:00:23.189 --> 00:00:30.864
The Hubble Space Telescope is an outstanding 
time machine, in a sense, because of course in  

4
00:00:30.864 --> 00:00:37.328
astronomy anything we look at in space we're 
seeing it as it was when the light from that  

5
00:00:37.328 --> 00:00:42.459
object, be it a planet, a star, or 
a galaxy began its journey to us.  

6
00:00:42.459 --> 00:00:48.298
Now, normally we don't really think about 
that when we're just looking at the night sky,  

7
00:00:48.298 --> 00:00:53.511
but it's incredibly important for our studies 
with the Hubble Space Telescope to realize that  

8
00:00:53.511 --> 00:00:59.350
when we're looking at a galaxy, we're 
seeing it as it was millions of years  

9
00:00:59.350 --> 00:01:07.942
ago, sometimes billions of years ago. It's 
taken that long for the light to get to us.

10
00:01:07.942 --> 00:01:23.122
In 2004, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field revealed
over 3 times more galaxies than the Hubble Deep Field.

11
00:01:23.122 --> 00:01:36.846
Further Hubble deep fields have shown
us that there are hundreds of billions
of galaxies in the universe.

12
00:01:36.846 --> 00:01:41.518
One of the neat things about the Hubble Ultra Deep 
field, and one of the things that made it so unique  

13
00:01:41.518 --> 00:01:46.523
was how long it took us to take that image. There's 
an exposure time that's expressed, I think it's  

14
00:01:46.523 --> 00:01:53.029
11.2 days. it's a very. very long exposure time. But 
probably what's more important is how many orbits  

15
00:01:53.029 --> 00:02:00.787
it took us to do that. 400 orbits of Hubble data 
to take that image, that's a lot of orbits! It was  

16
00:02:00.787 --> 00:02:06.960
a lot of Hubble time, you only get 15 orbits a day, 
to take 400 orbits and say we're going to observe  

17
00:02:06.960 --> 00:02:12.465
this one spot in the sky for 400 orbits, and I 
think the results from the science, I mean it was  

18
00:02:12.465 --> 00:02:16.052
amazing, what they saw was spectacular.

19
00:02:16.052 --> 00:02:19.722
We see some of the faintest
objects showing up in these images  

20
00:02:19.722 --> 00:02:27.105
and those faint objects are often distant galaxies. 
These deep fields have revealed visually to us  

21
00:02:27.105 --> 00:02:33.361
a universe absolutely teeming with galaxies, 
hundreds of billions of galaxies. In one deep  

22
00:02:33.361 --> 00:02:39.576
field alone we can see a thousand of these little 
smudges of light which are distant galaxies.  

23
00:02:39.576 --> 00:02:46.708
By doing that we can compare galaxies that are 
shining to us from billions of light years away  

24
00:02:46.708 --> 00:02:53.173
with galaxies closer to us, or even to our own 
Milky Way and see if they're similar or different.  

25
00:02:53.173 --> 00:03:01.222
What Hubble has revealed is that the universe 
has in fact changed over these billions of years of time.

26
00:03:01.222 --> 00:03:06.227
We looked at the darkest part 
of the sky, very small part of that, and we  

27
00:03:06.227 --> 00:03:12.233
were amazed at how many galaxies we found. And we 
continued to go back to that portion of the sky  

28
00:03:12.233 --> 00:03:21.659
to even increase that visibility, and we've seen 
tens of thousands of galaxies, just it's amazing.  

29
00:03:21.659 --> 00:03:25.496
Hubble spent two weeks taking 
pictures of empty places in the sky,  

30
00:03:25.496 --> 00:03:29.500
and they saw they weren't empty at all there were 
thousands and thousands of galaxies. In astronomy,  

31
00:03:29.500 --> 00:03:33.755
there's what we knew before Hubble and now there's 
what we know after Hubble, they're so different.  

32
00:03:33.755 --> 00:03:37.175
Basically every page of an astronomy textbook now 

33
00:03:37.175 --> 00:03:41.512
says something about discoveries
made with Hubble, every page.

34
00:03:41.512 --> 00:03:46.601
Hubble has given us this picture of the 
universe evolving over billions of years of time  

35
00:03:46.601 --> 00:03:54.067
into a place where now we have galaxies with 
plenty of stars and interesting chemical makeup,  

36
00:03:54.067 --> 00:04:01.241
so this is something that I'm grateful to the 
Hubble Space Telescope for opening our eyes to.

37
00:04:01.241 --> 00:04:18.007
[ MUSIC ]