UniVerses

This remarkable image was collected by focusing the Hubble Space Telescope  on a line of site that was nearly empty for a very long exposure. The light that was collected by the space telescope began its journey shortly after the Universe (as we know it) began, nearly 14 billion years ago.

journey

from the dawn of time this faintest breath
of light has skimmed across the universe.
it shimmers: blue remains of distant death.
an ancient inkling shifts time into reverse
collected through a telescope’s keen eye.
their spectrum weakened by the cosmic journey
these photons riccocheted across the sky
and connect the furthest reaches of infinity.
nigh fourteen billion years ago spewed out
to show us how their star appeared that day
and what the primal forces brought about.
their source has long since blown away.
throughout the mists of space this confluence
has spanned the incarnation of sentience.

We are connected to the Universe by light, the only one of our senses that spans vast distances. Light is a form of radiation we can see, either directly or through instruments which detect other wavelengths (like infra-red, x-rays or gamma rays).

When we see a star's light in the sky our eye is capturing photons that were emitted long ago. Like a snapshot, they carry the image of what that star looked like at the moment these photons began their journey. Depending on how far away that star was, its type and age, it may have extinguished since.

Our knowledge of the heavens is confined to objects that emit light, which are a only fraction of the heavens. Sometimes we can detect the influence of things we can't see, but know exist because of the way they change the behavior of things we can see. That's how we detect Black Holes, for example.

We know there are subatomic particles we can't see. For example, neutrinos pass through matter as though it wasn’t there, and are almost invisible to us. We can detect Dark Matter through its influence, but we don’t yet know its nature. We are only beginning to learn the scope of the universe!

What are the oldest images we have? The earliest picture of star systems are shown to the left. These photons began their journey before the Sun, Earth and Life itself were created.

Was there anything before?

We can imagine, through the language of mathematics, the nature of the Cosmos shortly after the Origin, the moment when Creation began, but we can't detect any trace of what existed before then. Which does not mean that nothing existed.

What was it like at the birth of the Universe?

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