Michael Broukhim

0 notes &

You see, what happened some years ago was that NASA completed a low-resolution map of the night sky, and they decided they wanted to go deeper. So they picked a little, tiny patch of space—about the size of a pencil tip at arm’s length. It was utterly insignificant, really, just another blank patch of space with nothing there, but they decided to point the finely-honed lens of the Hubble telescope at that patch in the hope of detecting whatever lonely photons of light might trickle in from that region of space.

Each time the Hubble made its way around the earth, it pointed toward that patch for 20 minutes. After 400 orbits, they took all the data and compiled it to discover not a star, nor a cluster of stars, but ten. thousand. galaxies. Turns out that blank patch wasn’t so blank after all. Now, assuming a galaxy is about a 100 billion stars, that’s a thousand trillion stars—many of which, much like our own sun, presumably have their own planetary systems, all with the potential to house as-yet unknown forms of biology.