Tag Archives: stars

Inconceivably vast

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Webb’s First Deep Field is the first operational image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The deep-field photograph, which covers a tiny area of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is centered on SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans. Thousands of galaxies are visible in the image, some as old as 13 billion years.The image is the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken. Captured by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the image was revealed to the public by NASA on 11 July 2022. (Wikipedia)

It’s too hard to fathom just how big the universe is. The image below only shows a few stars, they are the bright spots with 6 flares coming off of them… a by-product of the James Webb telescope’s design. The rest of the bright spots are galaxies. Galaxies that each hold billions or trillions of stars.

And if you held your pinky up to the night sky you would completely cover the area of the sky that this photo covers with a sliver of a finger nail.

We are so insignificantly tiny, and our Milky Way galaxy is so insignificantly placed in the universe. We just can’t conceive of just how inconceivably vast our universe is, and how insignificantly tiny our solar system is.

It’s too much to comprehend. And yet, here we are. So significant to each other, so connected to our planet. We get to live lives rich in mystery and wonder.

What other life is out there, or was out there, some time in the 13 billion years of our universe’s existence? Could alien life comprehend our existence? We’ll probably never know.

If there was life in one of these distant galaxies right now, we wouldn’t it know for millions or billions of years. The light we see in that photo above are from the past. To put it into perspective, if they were looking at light from our planet, they would be seeing light emitted from before dinosaurs roamed the earth… in other words they would be looking at prehistoric life on a planet with single cell organisms or perhaps no life at all… yet.

It’s too hard to grasp. It’s inconceivable.

Looking back in time

It’s hard to grasp the idea that when we look at a star, we are looking at that star from an era long ago. Even when we look at our own sun, we only see it as it was 8 minutes ago, because that’s how long the light takes to get to us. The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri at 4.25 light years away. When we see the light from this star we are seeing it as it shone 4.25 years ago.

When we look at the night sky, we are looking at a history of the universe, with each distant star sharing a different part of its past with us.

We look at people who are close to us in the same way. We don’t just see them, we see our past with them. We see the last time we met. Did we get along or did we have a conflict? Did we create a fond memory or did we face a problem? Did we grow closer together or does the distance from our last meeting make us feel farther apart?

In a way, relationships can be like distant stars, fading into the past unless we make an effort to see people in a new light. Because our connection to people comes from the way we look at our previous interactions, our history together. This is all we have until we shed new light on one another. Glimpses of history that tell stories… be they stories of our universe or stories of friendship. In both cases we are looking at our past to make sense of our future.