(photo courtesy of NASA)

Earlier this month, NASA released this breath-taking image seen above which reveals 12 billion years of cosmic history. What makes it visually stunning is the fact that those bright spots are not stars, but thousands of galaxies in various stages of growth and development (click here to see a HD version of this picture, courtesy of NASA).

For those of you who might not be familiar with astronomy, it might sound weird that this one photograph could show 12 billion years of our universe’s history. That is, until we figure in just how big the universe is. To understand this better, let’s first consider the fact that light travels at a constant speed of 300,000 km/sec – it can’t speed up or conversely, slow down. As such, the bigger the distance between a light source – like a star or galaxy – and Earth, the longer it will take the light from that source to reach our planet.

In the case of this photograph, the light from the galaxies that we see in the foreground actually left that galaxy about 1 billion years ago, while those reddish glows fading into the background represents light that was emitted by distant galaxies almost 12 billion years ago and which only now has reached our part of the universe.

With its references to time spans in the billions of years and distances that go from millions of kilometers out to infinity, astronomy can certainly challenge Click here to continue reading »”Finding Some Perspective in The Cosmos”

While going through some correspondence I received over the holiday break, I came upon this wonderful news piece that I wanted to share. Last week, the international team behind the Cassini-Huygens mission released new images of the planet Saturn, including one that features a “natural colour view” of the planet. As you can see in the image above, this new look at Saturn reveals a colour scheme that differs greatly from the one we’re all probably familiar with when we think of what Saturn looks like.

To demonstrate, let’s compare this new image of Saturn from the Cassini space probe taken this past July against the image of this same planet taken by Voyager 2 in 1981 – Click here to continue reading »”Saturn’s True Colours – A Majestic View From The Heavens”