“In the beginning, God created
The heavens and the earth”—
A most myopic story of
The universe’s birth
The lenses on the Hubble
Look through time as well as space
The ancients might have spied with it
Their vast Creator’s face
The skies they saw were very small
Those centuries ago
We’ve traded in those old beliefs
For things we really know
If we should keep exploring
All that science will allow…
Imagine how much more we’ll know
Two thousand years from now!
NASA just released their latest deep-field image–the XDF, or eXtreme Deep Field, which combines ten years’ worth of images. There are over 5,000 galaxies in this image. That would be over 5,000 galaxies more than the people who wrote about “the heavens and the earth” could even imagine.
How tiny a fragment of the sky is this? Take a look:
Deep Field in perspective
I wonder how long it will be before we look at these images as important but quaint artifacts, long surpassed by pictures with better resolution, more detail, surprises we can’t even imagine at present. I also cannot imagine thinking that a world view that hasn’t changed in 2,000 years is somehow superior to one that changes with each new discovery.