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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.

Insignificantly small

I’ve been following updates from the James Webb Telescope and its fascinating to see how its expanding our knowledge of our universe. Recent news includes an “active supermassive black hole 10 million times the mass of the Sun”. (MSN)

To give this a different perspective on the physical size of this black hole. Our entire galaxy would fill less than 1% of this black hole. It’s hard to comprehend just how big this is. It boggles the mind to think of the scale of the universe. 500 years ago the work of Copernicus and Galileo helped change modern physics by defying the church and arguing that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, with our sun circling the earth. Now we can see the insignificance of our planet on the scale of the universe.

We are so insignificantly small. Furthermore, we know so little about our universe… and it’s exciting to know that new discoveries and theories are still being developed thanks to this telescope. We may not inhabit a significant part of the universe, but our knowledge of what’s beyond our galaxy is expanding. I find this exciting!

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Another fascinating point that boggles the mind with respect to the size of things in our universe: the radius of the star, UY Scuti is 1,700 times bigger than our sun. It would engulf Jupiter if it replaced our sun! (Source)