Leigh in Azerbaijan

On Google Earth I wandered into the Sky part this afternoon and went looking at Hubble’s farthest photos with one million second exposures – photons arriving at one per second for the outer galaxies.  Thought the the following was good to record for my students, from Earth and Sky.

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Martin Rees also said: We’ve made immense progress in cosmology in the last few years, but this progress has brought into focus a new set of mysteries that we never envisioned before. We’ve learned about what the universe is made of, but that’s given us surprises. We’ve learned that:

1. it’s only 4% made up of ordinary atoms
2. about 25% is made up of dark matter, which is completely unknown,
   
3. but more than 70% is even more mysterious – energy latent in space itself.

 And so the challenge in the future is to understand the nature of dark matter, to understand the nature of space, and also to understand the way our universe has changed, from a Big Bang, which is very dense and very hot, to our complex cosmos nearly 14 billion years later.