Best pictures of the universe series#

NEARBY GALAXIESД«ill Miller/David Malin-California Institute of TechnologyД¬olors Unveiled: (1959): The vast distances of even the brightest galaxies long made their colors impossible to discern. Astronomers are struck by images of the Whirlpool Galaxy not just because of their beauty, but because this is how our own Milky Way would appear if we could look back on it from a similar remove. The smaller body off to the right of the image-little more than a sooty-looking blotch in the 1845 sketch-is a dwarf galaxy that is slowly being reeled in by the larger mass. Beckwith (STSCI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STSCI/AURA)ДЄ Portrait Refined (2015): In 2005, many generations after the first historic drawing of the Whirlpool Galaxy was made, NASA released a composite picture of the same great formation, assembled from multiple images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The drawing was unveiled at an astronomical gathering in Cambridge months later, forever changing the 19th-century understanding of galaxies. With it, he and two astronomers made the first detailed observations of what we now call the Whirlpool Galaxy, located 23 million light years from Earth. That was when William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse, built a massive telescope with a 72-in. Galactic Swirl (1845): Even the grandest galaxies appear to be nothing but a small, bright smudge when seen from Earth-or at least they did until 1845. The bright white region in the lower right quadrant of the image is the galactic center, home to a supermassive black hole. The different colors indicate different wavelengths: yellow is near-infrared, pinkish is infrared, bluish is x-rays. It was no easy feat capturing this view, which stitches together images from NASAвЂ™s Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes. The Heart of Our Home (2009): Astronomy is usually about peering outward, but this 2009 image looks the other way, capturing the very center of the Milky Way. The Earth, once believed to sit at the center of it all, is in truth a cosmic afterthought. Each of the 50,000 dots represents an entire galaxy. From our little perch inside the Milky Way, the image shows the universe stretching out for about a billion light years, which is only a small fraction of its total size. The Long View (2013): The true-and vast-complexity of the universe was captured in this vista recorded by a pair of automated telescopes, one in the U.S. John Huchra, Thomas Jarrett 2Mass Collaboration, U. The sun, planets and constellations are seen orbiting the Earth, but in the lower right hand corner, Cellarius does acknowledge an alternative theory: Danish astronomer Tycho BraheвЂ™s model, in which most of the universe orbits the Earth, but the other five known planets circle the sun. But CellariusвЂ™s magnificent rendering of the geocentric cosmos endures. All of them reveal a species searching for answers to the grandest celestial questions-and slowly, improbably, succeeding in that quest.Д®arth-Centered Cosmos (1660): History may not remember much about Andreas Cellarius, who, in 1660, was a school rector in Hoorn, The Netherlands. If there is dazzle in the contemporary images, there is a sweet, naГЇve genius in the earlier ones.

Best pictures of the universe series#

In the stunning new book Universe: Exploring the Astronomical World, an international panel of academics, artists, astronomers and more have collected a series of engravings, paintings, sketches and photographs, showing how our view of the cosmos has slowly changed. The more the stargazers learned, the more they tried to share what they were discovering with the rest of humanity. Over the centuries, we slowly came to a clearer understanding of the structure and workings of the universe, thanks to the birth of the telescope and the steady accumulation of human knowledge. The sun, suspended above it all, streams through in a brilliant scattering of starry points. In the evening, a gigantic bowl with thousands of pinprick holes is inverted over the Earth-or so the thinking went. ItвЂ™s easy to laugh at the ancient humans who thought of the nighttime sky as a sort of cosmic colander, but the idea made an intuitive kind of sense. The human species is ever-changing and so is our view of the universe.