“Look at this image; known as the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field.”

STOP. Stop whatever you’re doing for a second and relax. Take a breath. Look at this image; known as the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field. It covers a patch in the sky about 2.3 arcminutes wide. For the uninitiated, one degree is divided into 60 arcminutes. Imagine the tip of a needle held approximately at arms length. That’s it. That’s all the area this image covers in our sky. It contains roughly 5500 galaxies. Some of them so distant, our brains would stop working if we even start to imagine the amazing scale of it. It is the most sensitive image of our universe that we have captured to date (a 2 million second exposure; roughly 23 days).

Size of the Hubble XDF as compared to the moon. Source: www.nasa.gov.in

“Each tiny speck that you see (and the many more you can’t even see) is a galaxy.”

I could go on and on about Hubble and the amazing photographs it has captured over the years. That deserves a whole article for itself. But consider this: Each tiny speck that you see (and the many more you can’t even see) is a galaxy. A billion stars in each. Some massive, beyond our wildest imagination; some small but equally perplexing.

But that’s not it. It doesn’t end here. Things aren’t quite as straightforward as they might appear to be at first glance. Every point in this image represents a different point of time in the existence of this very Universe. Light travels incredibly fast (300,000 km in one SECOND). But alas, such is the incredible vastness of space that it challenges our notions of reality every step of the way. It takes billions of years for the light from these galaxies to reach us. What we see captured on the sensor of the Hubble may well have died out to be replaced by newer, possibly weirder things. But we won’t know it yet. We won’t know it for a few billion years.

“Some of the faintest points that you can see are actually galaxies from the earliest time we have been able to observe the Universe. It is the ghost of our Universe hiding in plain sight”

Some of the faintest points that you can see are actually galaxies from the earliest time we have been able to observe the Universe. It is the ghost of our Universe hiding in plain sight, reaching out to us; or to any damn fool who’s sitting there patiently waiting to capture this. It is a message from our very own Universe. Just after its formation. It has all the information that we can ever hope for to decode our place in the Universe. Right there in our grasp, waiting for us to figure out the hidden messages buried deep in the wavelengths of light. It is like one of those irritating jigsaw puzzles. You seem to have all the pieces until you realise one of them is missing. So you start looking. You look everywhere but often overlook that one place where it has always been hiding: right under your nose. And when you finally look there, it all just clicks and falls into place.

The Hubble Space Telescope. Source: www.spacetelescope.org

This is no ordinary image. It is a window to the past. It is everything we can see for as far as we can see. It has everything you’ll ever need to know. It will not give you the answers you’re looking for. In all honesty, it raises more questions than the ones it answers. But that’s where the beauty lies. It makes you wonder about your place in the stars. It will make you look beyond yourself. It will make you feel things. It will make you feel horribly small and insignificant in the larger scheme of things. But here you are, recording it; sitting in a corner with a hot mug of coffee in your hand and reading about it and the incredible realisation it brings. So, perhaps you’re not as insignificant. Perhaps.