14 billion is the age of the universe in years.
Articles with Galaxies
A portion of the Ultra Deep Field • NASA/ESA (Public Domain)
The M33 Galaxy • Image by ESO (CC By 4.0)
Seeing what we want to see
A Newsweek magazine poll some years ago found that 87% of Americans believe in a God who answers prayers.
A portion of the Ultra Deep Field • NASA/ESA (Public Domain)
The visible and the invisible
“The power of the visible is the invisible,” wrote the poet Marianne Moore.
The Earth and its abstraction
Secret of not knowing
Twenty-two hundred years ago, in the city of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile River, a fellow named Eratosthenes drew a circle on papyrus and said, “This is the Earth.”
Artist's impression of the current oldest known galaxy, GN-z11 • Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Peering through the Hubble Telescope to our distant past
A few weeks ago, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope said they discovered the most distant object yet observed in the universe — a galaxy 13 billion light-years from Earth.
The Hubble Deep Field photograph • R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA/ESA
Living happily in the giga-universe
What’s a billion?
The Hubble Deep Field photograph • R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA/ESA
The universe of the mind
By now, you have probably seen the Hubble Deep Field photograph of the early universe. Many newspapers and news magazines have published this extraordinary image of the most distant galaxies ever observed.
Countless galaxies • NASA, ESA (Public Domain)
Galactic images
The cluster of white domes on Siding Spring Mountain in New South Wales, Australia, reminded me of the bulbs of the white Aminita mushrooms that spring up overnight in the New England woodlands after an autumn rain.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
Feeling at home in the Milky Way
On the night of an August meteor shower, my son and I slept under the open sky. It was a night of exceptional clarity, far from the lights and haze of Boston. Meteors flashed against a background of stars so numerous the heavens seemed more light than dark.