> Over the course of a year, Chandra stared at the cosmic lens for two weeks — one of its longest observation campaigns yet — and collected 19 X-ray photons coming from a galaxy called UHZ1, at a redshift of 10.1. Those 19 high-octane photons most likely came from a growing black hole that existed fewer than half a billion years after the Big Bang, making it by far the most distant X-ray source ever detected.
This blew my tiny mind.
19 photons over 2 weeks. That's such a tiny amount of light. How are we able to conclude anything from such tiny amounts of light? (I'm not disputing that we can, it just blows my mind that we can).
And those photons - 13+ billion years speeding through space, all that vast empty time and distance, to end up hitting a detector during those two weeks when doing so will change the way we think about the universe. And of course the photon itself hasn't experienced any of that time. For the photon, it was all the same moment.
Also blows my mind that any time I'm standing outside I'm being hit by photons that have been traveling for billions of years to reach that point. Of course they're overwhelmed by photons from the Sun, but still. Some photon left a sun billions of years ago, sped through the universe for all that time, and ended up hitting my retina. And I don't even realise when this happens.
I understand why theists don't like science. How can your puny god compare to shit like this?
You used to be able to tune a TV between channels and listen to the hiss of the cosmic microwave background. That’s light from millions of years before the first stars.
Digital TVs just don’t have that 2.73 degrees above absolute zero sound to them.
Now imagine that the Chandra telescope has a 1.2 meter diameter aperture that those 19 photons passed through.
That represents 1.13 square meters of light collecting area, peering into that expanding spherical wavefront at the point where it is 26+ billion light years in diameter.
That would be a sphere with a surface area of 2,123 square light years. I wonder what it would add up to if you had the 19 photons for all those other 1.13 meter chunks of area in one place.
This blew my tiny mind.
19 photons over 2 weeks. That's such a tiny amount of light. How are we able to conclude anything from such tiny amounts of light? (I'm not disputing that we can, it just blows my mind that we can).
And those photons - 13+ billion years speeding through space, all that vast empty time and distance, to end up hitting a detector during those two weeks when doing so will change the way we think about the universe. And of course the photon itself hasn't experienced any of that time. For the photon, it was all the same moment.
Also blows my mind that any time I'm standing outside I'm being hit by photons that have been traveling for billions of years to reach that point. Of course they're overwhelmed by photons from the Sun, but still. Some photon left a sun billions of years ago, sped through the universe for all that time, and ended up hitting my retina. And I don't even realise when this happens.
I understand why theists don't like science. How can your puny god compare to shit like this?