1 00:00:00,001 --> 00:00:08,150 "We Asked NASA Scientists and Astronauts... 'What is your Favorite Hubble Image?'" 2 00:00:08,150 --> 00:00:18,800 Hi, my name is Paul Morris, and I'm a video  producer for the Hubble Space Telescope. 3 00:00:18,800 --> 00:00:23,840 Over the years, I've had the amazing opportunity  to interview some of the brightest minds in   4 00:00:23,840 --> 00:00:30,720 astrophysics, and some of the coolest astronauts  and people in the world. As a rule, I always ask   5 00:00:30,720 --> 00:00:36,279 every single person this one question. Every.  Single. Time. 6 00:00:36,279 --> 00:00:38,638 This is the cliche question,   7 00:00:38,638 --> 00:00:46,800 but what's your favorite Hubble image?  Oh, what is my favorite Hubble image? Ah.   8 00:00:46,800 --> 00:00:52,080 Can you talk about your favorite Hubble image? 9 00:00:52,080 --> 00:00:55,847 What is your favorite Hubble image and why? 10 00:00:55,847 --> 00:01:00,364 What is your favorite Hubble image and why? 11 00:01:00,364 --> 00:01:03,385 I began to see a pattern in their answers. 12 00:01:03,385 --> 00:01:04,363 The Hubble Deep Field. 13 00:01:04,363 --> 00:01:05,446 The Ultra Deep Field. 14 00:01:05,446 --> 00:01:06,960 The Ultra Deep Field. 15 00:01:06,960 --> 00:01:10,960 One of the questions you were going to ask me was,  what was my favorite image? My favorite image is   16 00:01:10,960 --> 00:01:18,640 the Deep Field image because it's one that that  tells an incredible story about our universe. 17 00:01:18,640 --> 00:01:24,800 Back In 1994, Robert Williams, then director  of the Space Telescope Science Institute in   18 00:01:24,800 --> 00:01:30,640 Baltimore, Maryland, came up with a plan. He  wanted to point Hubble at a spot in the sky   19 00:01:30,640 --> 00:01:35,120 where there was seemingly nothing there. A  lot of scientists and astronomers at   20 00:01:35,120 --> 00:01:41,360 the time thought this was a huge waste of  valuable Hubble resources and pushed back. 21 00:01:41,360 --> 00:01:47,760 Williams, however, continued forward with his plan. He  controlled 10 percent of Hubble’s observation   22 00:01:47,760 --> 00:01:52,720 time, known as director’s discretionary  time. He decided to use some of that to   23 00:01:52,720 --> 00:01:57,360 take a long exposure that would be made  immediately available to the public. 24 00:01:57,360 --> 00:02:01,040 Taken over the course of 10 days in 1995,   25 00:02:01,040 --> 00:02:06,320 the Hubble Deep Field captured roughly  3,000 distant galaxies in various stages   26 00:02:06,320 --> 00:02:14,000 of evolution. 3,000 galaxies where it seemed  like there was nothing. The world was stunned. 27 00:02:14,000 --> 00:02:18,640 When we finally looked at what  came back it was one of the most   28 00:02:18,640 --> 00:02:25,520 mind-boggling images of the whole Hubble  collection. Galaxies with billions of stars and   29 00:02:25,520 --> 00:02:30,640 billions of planets we know nowadays,  and guess what? One of those planets   30 00:02:30,640 --> 00:02:36,400 in this image may have somebody like you  or me, or some other intelligent life form   31 00:02:36,400 --> 00:02:41,600 that we don't even know about yet, so we got to  keep searching. We gotta tell that story, you know? 32 00:02:41,600 --> 00:02:47,520 The “deep” in Hubble Deep Field refers to the  telescope’s ability to look at some of these far,   33 00:02:47,520 --> 00:02:54,240 faint objects. Looking at far-away objects in  space is like seeing back in time. Light moves   34 00:02:54,240 --> 00:02:59,920 at tremendous speeds, but it still takes time  to travel across the vastness of space. Even   35 00:02:59,920 --> 00:03:05,440 the light from our own Sun needs eight minutes and  20 seconds to reach Earth, so when we look at the   36 00:03:05,440 --> 00:03:10,640 Sun, we see it as it was a little more than eight  minutes earlier. The farther away the object,   37 00:03:10,640 --> 00:03:16,640 the younger it appears in Hubble’s eyes. The Deep  Field was like a core sample of space, showing   38 00:03:16,640 --> 00:03:22,560 galaxies at different and earlier stages of  development the deeper they appeared in the image. 39 00:03:22,560 --> 00:03:26,880 Science and astronomy is all about  honing and improving our senses.   40 00:03:26,880 --> 00:03:32,720 No one expected the Hubble deep field to have  thousands of galaxies in that single image… 41 00:03:32,720 --> 00:03:39,440 We thought X, and we were so wrong. And that  experiment, it took great engineering to do,   42 00:03:39,440 --> 00:03:44,720 with a great system, Hubble, allowed the  astrophysics to say, "hold it!" You know, "it's   43 00:03:44,720 --> 00:03:52,080 different." It helped connect the dark energy, dark  matter theories, to what the light we can see is,   44 00:03:52,080 --> 00:03:57,200 and for me, it's beautiful because it's  like looking into a pond and seeing the water   45 00:03:57,200 --> 00:04:05,040 molecules, and the living cells that are micron  around, of the microbes, it's like that kind of   46 00:04:05,040 --> 00:04:09,440 moment. It must have been like the early  microscopists who first looked at pond scum   47 00:04:09,440 --> 00:04:15,200 and said, "geez there's stuff going on!" Or Galileo  when he first sensed the satellites of Jupiter. 48 00:04:15,200 --> 00:04:19,600 Since the original Hubble Deep Field, Hubble has gone on to collect over 20 deep   49 00:04:19,600 --> 00:04:25,600 fields of various parts of the sky in multiple  wavelengths of light. To create each image,   50 00:04:25,600 --> 00:04:31,840 it has gazed at the same point in space for  many orbits, gathering as much light as it can. 51 00:04:31,840 --> 00:04:37,120 Every single one of these increased our  knowledge of the universe and our place in it. 52 00:04:37,120 --> 00:04:41,200 The Hubble Ultra Deep Field,  for instance, released in 2004,   53 00:04:41,200 --> 00:04:44,880 had a longer exposure time  than the previous deep field.   54 00:04:44,880 --> 00:04:51,280 This new snapshot contained even more galaxies  of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. 55 00:04:51,280 --> 00:04:55,120 The smallest, reddest galaxies may  be among the most distant known,   56 00:04:55,120 --> 00:04:59,920 existing when the universe was  just 800 million years old. 57 00:04:59,920 --> 00:05:05,920 When I stare at that image, my imagination  goes wild. I wonder what it would be like to   58 00:05:05,920 --> 00:05:11,760 visit any one of those little smudges of light,  which would be, presumably, possibly similar to our   59 00:05:11,760 --> 00:05:18,720 own Milky Way Galaxy, and also realizing that if  we extrapolate that image to the whole sky, that's   60 00:05:18,720 --> 00:05:24,640 what our universe looks like. In any direction,  we see a collection of galaxies like that. 61 00:05:24,640 --> 00:05:29,440 The width of the Hubble Ultra Deep  Field is less than 1/10 the diameter   62 00:05:29,440 --> 00:05:34,480 of the full moon. That’s like looking through the eye  of a needle held at arm's length. 63 00:05:34,480 --> 00:05:41,140 And in that tiny  space we found 10,000 galaxies. 64 00:05:41,140 --> 00:05:45,639 10,000 galaxies in that single space, 10,000  galaxies in that one too, 65 00:05:45,639 --> 00:05:50,745 10,000 galaxies there, and 10,000 galaxies there, 66 00:05:50,745 --> 00:05:55,200 10,000 galaxies there, and 10,000 galaxies there too. 67 00:05:55,200 --> 00:05:59,120 If you add them all up, that means  the entire observable universe   68 00:05:59,120 --> 00:06:04,480 is estimated to contain at  least 200 billion galaxies. 69 00:06:04,480 --> 00:06:11,120 200 billion galaxies. If each galaxy has  an average of 100 million stars in it,   70 00:06:11,120 --> 00:06:16,720 then that means there are at least 20  quintillion stars in the observable universe.   71 00:06:16,720 --> 00:06:21,600 That’s a 2 with 19 zeros after it!   72 00:06:21,600 --> 00:06:28,000 It makes me, of course just overwhelmed,  but also, just very curious about,   73 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:33,040 wouldn't it be wonderful if I could just beam  myself over to one of those galaxies and explore   74 00:06:33,040 --> 00:06:37,600 around and see if they have stars and planets  like we have in our own Milky Way? And just to   75 00:06:37,600 --> 00:06:43,760 be amazed, not only at the magnitude of  the universe but to be grateful that I can be   76 00:06:43,760 --> 00:06:49,600 a part of the universe and have the ability to  look out and see this grandeur. That's what I   77 00:06:49,600 --> 00:06:55,760 love about the Ultra Deep Field, and that's  what I love about astronomy images in general. 78 00:06:55,760 --> 00:06:57,920 Inspired by Hubble’s Deep Field,   79 00:06:57,920 --> 00:07:02,960 other NASA Great Observatories would go on to  take deep field images in their own wavelengths   80 00:07:02,960 --> 00:07:09,600 of light. These observations continue to  make NASA science even richer than before. 81 00:07:09,600 --> 00:07:12,880 The Hubble Space Telescope has  helped us take a step forward   82 00:07:12,880 --> 00:07:15,840 in understanding our place in the universe. 83 00:07:15,840 --> 00:07:21,360 With Hubble’s mirror acting as our eyes, we are  just starting to perceive the real universe.   84 00:07:21,360 --> 00:07:27,520 And the deep field images are yet another  step forward to a brighter tomorrow. 85 00:07:27,520 --> 00:07:34,160 The image itself might not look as beautiful as a  single spiral galaxy where you see all the stars.   86 00:07:34,160 --> 00:07:40,000 But what you're looking at is a tiny little  part of the sky, and they found thousands of   87 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:45,440 galaxies in that tiny little spot. And so you  see this image, and the ones that are a little   88 00:07:45,440 --> 00:07:49,440 closer to us, you can see some detail on. You  can actually see that they're spiral galaxies,   89 00:07:49,440 --> 00:07:53,040 or kind of blobby elliptical galaxies.  They're actually beautiful little galaxies   90 00:07:53,040 --> 00:07:57,000 in and of themselves. Of course they're  not little, they're just very far away.   91 00:07:57,040 --> 00:08:03,040 But then you see this background, which really just  becomes dots. And each one of those dots is not   92 00:08:03,040 --> 00:08:10,080 a star, but a collection of hundreds of billions  of stars, just so far away that it appears as a dot.   93 00:08:10,080 --> 00:08:15,520 And some of the smaller dots in that  image, you're looking at galaxies as they were,   94 00:08:15,520 --> 00:08:22,560 you know, more than 10, 11 billion years ago. In  this tiny little dot in the sky, you can look   95 00:08:22,560 --> 00:08:27,680 through it, and you can see the history of the  whole universe. And so when you see the Hubble   96 00:08:27,680 --> 00:08:31,280 Deep Field, you know I can feel, you know,  the hair rising on the back of my neck, and   97 00:08:31,280 --> 00:08:37,120 I'm getting goosebumps even just thinking about  it, you know, through a tiny little pinhole you   98 00:08:37,120 --> 00:08:42,800 can see the whole history of the universe,  right there. That's the Hubble Deep Field. 99 00:08:42,800 --> 00:08:44,819 Wow. 100 00:08:44,819 --> 00:09:59,966 [ MUSIC ]