Starship Asterisk*

Chris Peterson wrote:

Psnarf wrote:
I'm pretty-much convinced that if you follow a path far enough from Earth through any aribitrary point in the celestial sphere, you'll eventually encounter a galaxy.

I think the probability of any arbitrary point in the sky lying in a galaxy is pretty low, meaning that (if we restrict ourselves to the observable Universe, and travel no further than 46 billion light years) we are unlikely to pass through any galaxies.

• If we travel further than 31 billion light years we are unlikely to pass through any galaxies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGSY8p7 wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]EGSY8p7 (Hubble and Spitzer, space telescopes)[/color][/b]

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<<EGSY8p7 is a distant galaxy, with a spectroscopic redshift of z = 8.68 (~30.44 Gly distant), a light travel distance of 13.2 billion light-years from Earth and observed as it existed 570 million years after the Big Bang. In July 2015, EGSY8p7 was announced as the oldest and most-distant known object.

The light of the EGSY8p7 galaxy appears to have been magnified twofold by gravitational lensing in the light's travel to Earth, enabling detecting EGSY8p7, which would not have been possible without the magnification. EGSY8p7's distance from Earth was determined by measuring the redshift of Lyman-alpha emissions. EGSY8p7 is the most distant known detection of hydrogen's Lyman-alpha emissions. The distance of this detection was surprising, because neutral hydrogen (atomic hydrogen) clouds filling the early universe should have absorbed these emissions, even by some hydrogen cloud sources closer to Earth, according to the standard cosmological model. A possible explanation for the detection would be that reionization progressed in a "patchy" manner, rather than homogeneously throughout the universe, creating patches where the EGSY8p7 hydrogen Lyman-alpha emissions could travel to Earth, because there were no neutral hydrogen clouds to absorb the emissions.>>

Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy -- since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.

- Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka:_A_Prose_Poem wrote:
<<Eureka (1848) is a lengthy non-fiction work by American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) which he subtitled "A Prose Poem", though it has also been subtitled as "An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe". Adapted from a lecture he had presented, Eureka describes Poe's intuitive conception of the nature of the universe with no antecedent scientific work done to reach his conclusions. Though it is generally considered a literary work, some of Poe's ideas anticipate 20th century scientific discoveries and theories.

Poe's work presages modern science with his own concept of the Big Bang.[32][33] He postulated that the universe began from a single originating particle or singularity[which] divides into all the particles of the universe. These particles seek one another because of their originating unity (gravity) resulting in the end of the universe as a single particle. Poe also expresses a cosmological theory that anticipated black holes and the Big Crunch theory as well as the first plausible solution to Olbers' paradox (the night sky is dark despite the vast number of stars in the universe). In 1987 astronomer Edward Robert Harrison published a book, Darkness at Night, on this paradox. This book clarified why lack of energy explains the paradox, and lays out how Harrison discovered that Poe's Eureka anticipated this conclusion.

Eureka was received poorly in Poe's day and generally described as absurd, even by friends. Modern critics continue to debate the significance of Eureka and some doubt its seriousness, in part because of Poe's many incorrect assumptions and his comedic descriptions of well-known historical minds. He considered it his greatest work and claimed it was more important than the discovery of gravity.>

Beyond wrote:

neufer wrote:

I've been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society

Hey, great happening, neufer, but what do they have to do with space?
Last i knew, they are earthers, and only see stars if they get run over in a stampede or something similar.

neufer wrote:

Ann wrote:
Thanks, alphachapmtl, for translating the neufer-ese for me!

Say, brainless...I've been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society

Ann wrote:
Thanks, alphachapmtl, for translating the neufer-ese for me!

alphachapmtl wrote:Specially the further we go the more packed are the galaxies, since older universe was smaller.

neufer wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

__ 8-micrometre infrared light = red,
H-alpha = green, visible red light = blue

Psnarf wrote:Upon closer inspection of the full-size image, I'm pretty-much convinced that if you follow a path far enough from Earth through any aribitrary point in the celestial sphere, you'll eventually encounter a galaxy.

Ann wrote:Art wrote:

It can't be Olber stated.

Yup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox.

Ann

It can't be Olber stated.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Psnarf wrote:
Upon closer inspection of the full-size image, I'm pretty-much convinced that if you follow a path far enough from Earth through any aribitrary point in the celestial sphere, you'll eventually encounter a galaxy.

I think the probability of any arbitrary point in the sky lying in a galaxy is pretty low, meaning that (if we restrict ourselves to the observable Universe, and travel no further than 46 billion light years) we are unlikely to pass through any galaxies.

[c]It can't be Olber stated. [/c]

Psnarf wrote:Upon closer inspection of the full-size image, I'm pretty-much convinced that if you follow a path far enough from Earth through any aribitrary point in the celestial sphere, you'll eventually encounter a galaxy.