"A mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam"

In December 1995 NASA instructed the Hubble Space Telescope to point its lens at an obscure, dark patch of space and take a series of photographs over 10 days. The final image, compiled from 342 separate exposures, rocked the scientific community and shattered current understandings about the nature of the Universe. The image, which came to be known as the Hubble Deep Field, showed over 3,000 galaxies in what was believed to be an empty corner of space. How many more galaxies than previously thought, then, were in the Universe?

The dark patch of space in the Ursa Major constellation that Hubble pointed its lens at

That dark patch of space: The Hubble Deep Field

Astounded by the implications of the Hubble Deep Field, scientists then instructed the Hubble Telescope to point its lens at another dark patch of space. The resulting image proved even more incredible. The image, known as the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, looked farther into the Universe than Mankind has ever looked before and captured an image of the Cosmos as it was approximately 13 billion years ago. Over 10,000 galaxies alone were visible in the image! Current estimates are that there are about 100-200 billion galaxies in the Universe, each composed of hundreds of billions of stars, each of which have their own solar system of orbiting planets.

A look 13 billion years into the past: The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field

The Milky Way is the home of our Sun and our planet is just one its orbiting celestial objects. It is 100,000 light years across - meaning that if one were traveling at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) it would take 100,000 years to travel across it. All of recorded human history could be repeated 20 times over in the time it would take to cross just our own galaxy. Then, even if we were to succeed in crossing the Milky Way, the nearest neighboring galaxy, known as the Andromeda Galaxy, would take another 2.5 million years to reach. Then, if we became truly ambitious and decided to travel from one edge of the Universe to the other it would take a mere 78 billion years at the speed of light.

Our neighborhood: The Milky Way Galaxy

So what does this all mean? For one, the conclusion that we are not alone in this Universe is unavoidable. How many other intelligent forms of life are out there? What can they teach us about the origins of the Cosmos and the Purpose underlying its existence? And in a Universe so enormous, so complex, and so beautiful, how can we not be in awe?