UniVerses

This remarkable image was collected by focusing the Hubble Space Telescope for a very long exposure on a line of site that appeared nearly empty. The light that was collected began its journey shortly after the Universe (as we know it) began, nearly 14 billion years ago.

Journey

From the dawn of time this faintest breath
of light has skimmed across the universe.
It shimmers: red remains of distant death.
An ancient inkling shifts time into reverse
collected through a telescope’s keen eye.
their spectrum weakened by the cosmic journey
these photons riccocheted across the sky
and connect the furthest reaches of infinity.
Nigh fourteen billion years ago spewed out
to show us how their star appeared that day
and what the primal forces brought about.
Their source has long since blown away.
Throughout the mists of space this confluence
has spanned the birth of Earth and sentience.

What do you see when you look up at the night sky? Mostly black space. In other words there's a lot more space than there is matter in the cosmos. 

If you think about it, we are connected to the Universe by light, the only one of our senses that spans vast distances. Light is a form of radiation we can see, but visible light is only a sliver of the entire spectrum, shown in this picture. The visible spectrum has been exploded below, to show the colors we know. Look how tiny a slivver of the spectrrum is visible to our eyes!

The Hubble Space Telescope collects light in the visible range. Newer telescopes examine wavelengths both shorter and longer, to improve our understanding by looking at other wavelengths, like X-rays, that aren't blocked by matter.

When we see a star's light in the sky our eye is capturing photons that were given off long ago. Like a snapshot, they carry the image of what that star looked like at the moment these photons began their journey. Depending on how far away that star was, its type and age, it may have extinguished since.

Our knowledge of the heavens is confined to objects that emit light, which are a only fraction of what's there. Sometimes we can detect the influence of things we can't see, but know exist because of the way they change the behavior of things we can see. This is how we detect Black Holes, for one example.

We also know there are subatomic particles we can't detect. For example, vast numbers of neutrinos bombard us constantly and pass through the earth as though it wasn’t there. We can detect Dark Matter through its influence, but we don’t know anything about its nature. After all these years of study we are only beginning to learn the mysteries of the universe!

The earliest picture of star systems is shown above. These photons began their journey before the Sun, Earth and Life itself were created.

Was there anything before?

We can imagine, through the language of mathematics, the nature of the Cosmos shortly after the Origin, the moment when Creation began, but we can't detect any trace of what existed before then. Which does not mean that nothing existed; rather that we don't have instruments that can detect its traces.

What was it like at the birth of the Universe?

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