Fourteen years ago, NASA's orbiting observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, began wowing us all with its celestial snapshots of exploding stars, colliding galaxies, and nebulous clouds of solar system nurseries. The real stunner, though, came in January 1996, when a team of astronomers unveiled their space scope masterpiece: the Hubble Deep Field. During the course of a ten-day exposure, particles of light traveling at 186,000 miles per second—and streaming our way for the past thirteen billion years—were compiled into a remarkable image of some of the most distant objects ever observed. Over fifteen hundred galaxies, many dating back to within one billion years of the Big Bang, were revealed in a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length.

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This year Hubble managed to peer back even further—to perhaps as early as three hundred million years post Big Bang, which is when the very first galaxies began to form and nearly nine billion years before Earth itself coalesced into existence. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF), this dazzling photo features an estimated ten thousand galaxies of various colors and shapes, at various stages of evolutionary development. The image was acquired during the course of four hundred Hubble orbits around Earth over a period of three months, totaling eight hundred separate exposures. Photons of light from the most distant objects seen in the image trickled in at a rate of one photon per minute, compared to millions of particles per minute from galaxies closer by. Thus, to examine the entire sky with the same resolution, astronomers say, would take about one million years.

Here at WIE we've been rather awestruck by all of this. So we decided to consult some acclaimed astrophysicists and cosmologists to get their professional insights. Judging by their responses, it seems we aren't the only ones in awe . . .

Ann Druyan

“Science lifts the curtain on a tiny piece of night and finds ten thousand galaxies hidden there. Each one a community of perhaps a hundred billion suns; each sun a potential home star to, say, a dozen worlds. How many stories, how many ways of being in the universe are contained therein? All residing in what, to us, had been just a little patch of empty sky. Seeing the light from these jewels shine forth across the great ocean of space and time, I marvel at our science and ache for a political and spiritual philosophy reflective of its insights.”

Ann Druyan was Carl Sagan's cowriter for twenty years. She is CEO of Cosmos Studios, which will launch into space later this year Cosmos I, the world's first solar sailing craft.

James N. Gardner

“In contemplating the image revealed by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, I am reminded of the sense of wonder felt by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the father of observational microbiology, when he first peered through a primitive microscope and glimpsed vast hordes of 'wee beasties' populating drops of pond water and human spittle. The hidden living firmament that so astonished the Dutch scientist (bacteria, protists, rotifers, nematodes, and much more) turned out to be the very foundation of the global ecosystem—the microscopic cells of Gaia's flesh and blood. So, too, the unsuspected celestial grandeur revealed by this image may someday be appreciated as a poignant baby photo—the faint image of a moment, unfathomably distant in time and space, when the vast universe began an utterly mysterious process of coming to life.”

James N. Gardner is a practicing lawyer, cosmologist, and former Oregon state senator. He is the author of Biocosm.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

“For me, what is most striking about the UDF is the richness of morphology revealed in even the tiniest of galaxies. The photogenic spirals, kindred forms to our own Milky Way, show the characteristic central bulges and the knots of freshly made stars that dot the spiral arms. Each of these galaxies, however small it appears in the image, is its own collection of hundreds of billions of stars.

“Let there be no misunderstanding: many ground-based images exist of the seemingly countless galaxies in the outer universe, but in all cases the galaxies appear as undistinguished smudges. By these, I am captured intellectually, but not emotionally. Only with sharp images like the UDF am I viscerally reminded that there are other worlds out there. Billions and billions of them. And I wonder: on planets around stars in the galaxies of the Ultra Deep Field, are there life-forms that are contemplating the universe the way we are? Or are they not paying attention because they are just looking for shelter, food, and sex, as does most life on Earth?”

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author, and director of New York's Hayden Planetarium, where he also teaches.

Brian Swimme

“What strikes me about the UDF is that we're at this incredible moment of understanding the depths of our being—the depths of our human being but also the depths of our cosmic being. You just get a sense of this vast cosmic odyssey, and we're right in the middle of it. Humans have been around for over a hundred thousand years, and we simply didn't know about this until recently. It's amazing.

“One of the interesting differences between this and the original deep field images is that there's more variety of galaxies—it's more chaotic. It reminds me of the way in which you'll have an explosion of animal forms at the birth of a species—an explosion of diversity, this incredible chaotic explosion of possibility—and then the universe sort of winnows out the more exotic shapes and enfolds them into forms that are more enduring. Diversity is a great way in which the universe explores its future.”

Brian Swimme, founder of the Epic of Evolution Society, is currently professor of cosmology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.