Academia, Society

NASA’s Time Machine

While this picture may look like a bunch of stars, but it comes close to a time machine. The picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has reached back 13.2 billion years to reveal baby galaxies after the Big Bang.

This is the picture of space just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang.
The existence of these newly found galaxies pushes back the time when galaxies.

They are the product of Hubble’s new infrared Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), installed in May.

The James Webb Space Telescope is planned for launch in 2014 and allow astronomers to study the detailed nature of early galaxies and go even further back in time.

For the full story, click here.

81 thoughts on “NASA’s Time Machine”

  1. Gyges:

    there are private research companies that hire extremely bright people and let them do their own research. Obviously they hope to make a profit at some point.

    Would you fund the Hubble? I bet you would give money to fund it and so would I and so would millions of others. the money would not have to be taken by force as it is now.

    ****insert long discourse on proper/original functions of government here***

  2. Byron,

    Maybe eventually, but what company do you know that will fund projects that will “eventually” have commercial applications? Particularly when there’s no guarantee how useful those applications will be, how soon they’ll exist, and what field they’ll be in.

    What company would fund the Hubble?

  3. Gyges:

    Most knowledge will eventually have commercial applications. I will admit that it is important to do cutting edge research to expand the limits of our knowledge.

    anyway here is an interesting song kind of on topic, sort of in a strange way:

  5. Byron,

    The private companies working on reaching space have clear economic strategies motivating them for a goal they know is achievable, and one that is more of a question of engineering than research. That’s a whole different beast than observing stretching the limits of the observable universe. Telescopes don’t produce predictable results, what they find could be immediately useful, or sit unexplained until another piece of the puzzle falls in line ten years later. Even then it could just be a piece of knowledge that has no business applications.

  6. Thirty-Percenter,

    Here are some terms to Google that should get you on your way (aside from the obvious “time travel” and “time travel theory”):

    Gödel metric, Everett’s Many-worlds Theory, Novikov self-consistency principle, grandfather paradox, the Casimir effect, Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture, time travel cosmic strings, time travel black holes, quantum entanglement, quantum tunneling, delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, Cauchy horizons, and Alcubierre drive (actual physics model of Star-Trek style warp drive developed by a Mexican physicist the drive is named for).

    Keep in mind you are going to find a huge array of conflicting literature, but it all leads to the idea that time travel to the past is possible (it does not violate all of the solutions for General Relativity) but it would require technology so far beyond our current state as to meet Arthur Clarke’s “practical magic” definition (any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic).

  7. Gyges:

    one statement on that – Virgin Galactic and the Ansari X Prize.

    If we gave the moon to whomever gets there first we would have a lunar colony and be mining whatever minerals are commercially viable instead of floundering around with a marginally sophisticated space station.

    Government has sucked up an amazing amount of resources over the years and deprived the private sector of capital. I postulate that had we had a truly free economy such as we had in the 50 or so years after the civil war (we got electricity, the automobile, the airplane) we would be at least one hundred years ahead of where we are now.

    Air travel and the automobile are essentially unchanged since 1960. Yes we have had some good advances in electronics but that has not been as regulated as the airplane and automobile industries.

    Anyway just some thoughts on that.

  8. “Thirty-Percenter,

    It’s my understanding that time travel into the past is possible, but very difficult whereas it’s easy to travel to the future using the effects of time dilation as you approach the speed of light.”

    I’d like to hear more about that. I’m not familiar with any technology that permits time travel into the past but I would like to be. To the best of my knowledge (which is limited) time would slow down on the event horizon of a black hole just as it would when traveling at accelerated speeds. Warp drive like on Star Trek would only go faster than the speed of light so I’m not clear on how that would cause time to reverse but I have seen the “double slit” experiment and it does seem like particles can be retroactively influenced. I just have a hard time grasping how.

  9. Gyges,

    Great blog find there. I’ll be hitting that spot again. I used to subscribe to Discovery magazine back in the day (still do to SciAm) and always liked their reporting.

    Thirty-Percenter,

    It’s my understanding that time travel into the past is possible, but very difficult whereas it’s easy to travel to the future using the effects of time dilation as you approach the speed of light. Going to the past would require a massive rotating black hole to accomplish, a wormhole or some kind of warp drive. The problem with travel into the past is paradox. The leading contenders to deal with this issue are the Gödel metric, Everett’s Many-worlds Theory and Novikov self-consistency principle. Both the Gödel and Novikov solutions depend on the closed timelike curves which are possible under some solutions of General Relativity.

  10. Dredd,

    I think we all know that the speed of light means “looking into the past”=”looking far away”. We’re looking far away. It’s a matter of terminology, like the “War on Terror”.

  11. Actually as an object speeds up time slows down in relation to it, thus time travel is a fact. Of course looking back in time by examining the light from stars is not time traveling, however it is peering back in time in manner of speaking. We’re seeing objects that have long since died off yet we’re still seeing them as if they were still there. That’s a form of time travel I suppose, if only mental.

    But in reality time travel is a real science. We know that time slows down as we increase in speed relative to the object that is accelerating. If for example we even approached a fraction of the speed of light in some sort of space vehicle then time would slow within the vehicle. This means the vehicles occupants could literally travel into the future. If we wanted to see what the earth looks like in thousands of years into the future we’d simply have to travel out into space at a speed that approaches light speed. The longer and faster we travel, the further into the future we can go.

    Of course the downside is there doesn’t appear to be a way back, so any data would be worthless to us and would only benefit the traveler. And for the traveler of course he’d returning to a planet where everyone he ever knew was long since dead so the value of such an experiment is dubious at best. But it is an interesting thing.

  12. There is no time travel, only long distance travel.

    The fact that we receive light which is 13 billion years old does not mean we went back in time 13 billion years, no more than looking at an old person takes one back to that person’s youth.

    Astronomers are fond of “astronomically speaking” because it is not nice to tell people of the reality of our “rocket science”.

    http://ecocosmology.blogspot.com/2009/12/lovely-planet-in-neighborhood.html

  13. Berliner’s comments reach the heart of the matter and expose the silliness of the global warming deniers. How can reducing the CO2 in the air, smog, pollution etc. be bad, except to purportedly cause some extra expense to certain industries? In truth though “Green” technology will provide a cheaper, more efficient and more intelligent context for industrialization. This is such a “no-brainer” that its opponents expose themselves as either lacking sense, or being so ignorantly partisan as to be laughable.
    An environmental policy that will allow humanity to work within the Earth’s ecology, rather than trying to conquer it, will make us stewards of our planet, rather than dumb beasts greedily eating
    more than we need to eat.

  14. Because this is way too interesting to let the thread get hijacked…

    Here’s a recent blog from the Bad Astronomer talking about NASA. For those of you science (especially astronomy) junkies out there, I highly recommend this blog, and subscribing to Bob Park’s weekly news letter “What’s New.”

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/01/05/nasa-chief-bolden-talks-nasa-astronomy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BadAstronomyBlog+(Bad+Astronomy)&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail

    Byron,

    This is why governments needs to be involved in funding research, they’re (by and large) the only organizations with enough resources to pull this stuff off. Not just the research into the very big, but the research into the very small, the very complex, the very isolated, etc.

  15. In a scientific paper, written on the subject of the weather on that night in 1912 when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk, E. N. Lawrence concludes that there is a link between sunspots and the icebergs found in shipping lanes in the early 1900s. Figure 5 is a plot from Lawrence’s paper showing the correlation between sunspots and icebergs.

    While most scientists would agree that sunspots did not really sink the Titanic, there is significant evidence to show that the cold climate of 1912 may have been in part due to the lower level of solar energy reaching Earth relative to today. The cold climate may have provided the conditions needed for large icebergs to drift far south of Greenland and into the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic. These icebergs were a severe hazard to early ships without radar especially at night when they could not see the icebergs. To state the connection more clearly, increases in globally averaged temperature, produced in part by increased solar and human activity, may have reduced the number of icebergs in the North Atlantic thereby preventing other disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic.

  18. I think the scientist from the institutions to which I link to are experts in their field, not some guy that sits in his underwear at home and claims he built computers since he was eight years old.

    So if there has been no rise in the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide and has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades then CO2 is NOT the main driver of temps.

  19. Just tally the potential consequences of a wrong reaction to global warming:

    – if the global warming wasn’t man made, but we reduced CO2 emissions:
    We wasted a small amount of the global GDP on green technology (which in many cases, e.g. energy saving, has other positive effects) and made rather minor adjustments to our lifestyle.

    – if the global warming was man made, but we refused to reduce CO2 emissions:
    Future generations are doomed to live in a world where “Mad Max” is an utopia.

    Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Or would you play Russian Roulette just to win a nice set of steak knifes?

  20. DID SUNSPOTS SINK THE TITANIC?

    Thats how it copy/pasted from the article, I didn’t shout it, the writer of the article did.

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