Took me 5 years to admit those Hubble deep field images are not what people think

I used to roll my eyes whenever someone posted a Hubble Deep Field photo and called it a time machine. Felt like overselling to me. But after reading the actual paper from 1995 and seeing how they stacked 342 exposures over 10 days, I changed my mind. The math on the redshift values is solid - those galaxies are really 13 billion light years away. No tricks, just patient engineering. Has anyone else had a moment where a famous photo turned out to be more impressive than the hype?

3 comments

3 Comments

evan_stone28d ago

thomas105 just said there's no independent verification on those distance claims. But hold up, the redshift measurements from the UDF have been cross checked by multiple teams using different telescopes like Keck and VLT. You're telling me ALL of them got the same numbers by accident? That's a pretty tough sell. How do you explain the consistency across instruments if the method is supposedly flawed?

ramirez.sage29d ago

Oh man, I went through something similar with the first black hole image from 2019. Everyone was saying it looked blurry and fake, but when I actually looked up how they built that image from eight radio telescopes and a crazy algorithm called CHIRP, it completely flipped my perspective. The time machine thing for Hubble... yeah, I get the pushback, but the way they corrected for cosmic dust and gravitational lensing makes the distance stuff way more solid than people give credit for. For me it was the Pale Blue Dot photo - I used to think it was just a cute gimmick, but reading about how they deliberately pointed Voyager back and calculated the exact shutter timing to catch Earth in the sunbeam gave me chills. Sometimes the real story behind the image is way better than the hype, you just gotta dig past the surface level takes.

thomas10529d ago

That 1995 paper had 37 co-authors and zero independent verification of the distance claims. The redshift values they cite assume the universe expands at a constant rate, which is still a guess. Cool photo, but calling it a time machine is like saying a mirror shows yesterday.