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See our view of the universe

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See our view of the universe

Unveiling The Universe

NASA/ESA/The Hubble Heritage Team

The human species is constantly changing and so is our view of the universe.

By Jeffrey Kluger

It’s easy to laugh at ancient humans who thought of the night sky as some sort of cosmic sieve, but the idea made intuitive sense. In the evening, a gigantic bowl with thousands of pinholes is inverted over the Earth, or so it was thought. The sun, suspended above everything, breaks through in a brilliant scattering of starry dots. Over the centuries, we slowly came to a clearer understanding of the structure and workings of the universe, thanks to the birth of the telescope and the steady accumulation of human knowledge. The more stargazers learned, the more they tried to share what they were discovering with the rest of humanity.

In the stunning new book Universe: Exploring the Astronomical World, an international panel of academics, artists, astronomers and more have collected a series of prints, paintings, sketches and photographs, showing how our view of the cosmos has slowly changed. If there is dazzle in the contemporary images, there is a sweet and naive genius in the earlier ones. All of them reveal a species searching for answers to the biggest celestial questions, and slowly, improbably, achieving that quest.

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM IN OUR GALAXY

Andreas Cellarius

Earth-centered cosmos (1660): History may not remember much about Andreas Cellarius, who in 1660 was a schoolmaster in Hoorn, Netherlands. But Cellarius’ magnificent interpretation of the geocentric cosmos endures. The sun, planets and constellations are seen orbiting the Earth, but in the lower right corner, Cellarius does acknowledge an alternative theory: the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s model, in which most of the universe orbits Earth, but the other five known planets circle it. the sun

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.John Huchra, Thomas Jarrett 2Mass Collaboration, U. Mass., IPAC

The long view (2013): The true and vast complexity of the universe was captured in this view recorded by a pair of automated telescopes, one in the United States and one in the Chilean desert. From our little perch inside the Milky Way, the image shows the universe stretching for about a billion light-years, which is only a tiny fraction of its total size. Each of the 50,000 points represents an entire galaxy. The Earth, once believed to sit at the center of everything, is actually a cosmic afterthought.

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.NASA, ESA, SSC, CXC, STCI

The heart of our home (2009): Astronomy is usually about looking out, but this image from 2009 looks the other way, capturing the very center of the Milky Way. It wasn’t easy to capture this view, which combines images from NASA’s Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes. Different colors indicate different wavelengths: yellow is near-infrared, pink is infrared, bluish is X-rays. The bright white region in the lower right quadrant of the image is the galactic center, where there is a supermassive black hole.

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.William Parsons, Earl of Rosse

galactic swirl (1845): Even the largest galaxies look like nothing more than a tiny bright spot when viewed from the Earth, or at least they did until 1845. It was then that William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse, built a massive telescope with a 72-inch telescope. mirror at his estate in Ireland. With it, he and two astronomers made the first detailed observations of what we now call the Whirlpool Galaxy, located 23 million light years from Earth. The drawing was presented at an astronomical meeting in Cambridge months later, forever changing the 19th century understanding of galaxies.

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STSCI) and the Hubble Heritage Team (STSCI/AURA)

A refined portrait (2015): In 2005, many generations after making the first historic drawing of the Whirlpool Galaxy, NASA released a composite image of the same large formation, assembled from multiple images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The smaller body to the right of the image (little more than a sooty-looking blob in the 1845 sketch) is a dwarf galaxy that is slowly being dragged by the larger mass. Astronomers are struck by images of the swirling galaxy not only because of their beauty, but because this is how our own Milky Way would appear if we could look back at it from a similar image.

NEAR GALAXY

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.Bill Miller/David Malin—California Institute of Technology

Colors Revealed: (1959): The great distances of even the brightest galaxies made their colors impossible to discern. Through the telescopes they appeared pale green or bleached white. In the 1950s, photographic engineer William Miller, who worked at the Mt. Wilson and Palomar in California, he rectified it. Over several years, he experimented with the chemical sensitivity of various types of color film and the wavelengths of visible light coming through telescopes, eventually producing this spectacular image of the galaxy Andromeda, 2.5 million light years from Earth.

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.Optical: ESO, WFI: Submillimeter: MPIFR, ESO, APEX, A. Weiss et al. X-rays: NASA, CXC, CFA, R.Kraft et al.

Slow motion fusion (2009): A collision between two galaxies is a surprisingly peaceful business. The wide spaces between the stars ensure that the two formations flow together, with few, if any, stars in contact with each other. In 2009, a combination of optical and radio telescope observations produced this image of a spiral galaxy and an elliptical galaxy gradually merging into one, 13 million light-years from Earth. You can’t see, in the middle of everything, a supermassive black hole with a mass of 55 million suns.

DISCOVERING OUR PLANETS

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.Maria Clara Emmart

The worlds as art (End of the 17th century): At the end of the 17th century, when astronomy was exclusively a male field, Maria Clara Eimmart, a German illustrator, became a barrier breaker. Working in his father’s observatory in a time long before photography, he drew and painted the images that could only be seen by people with access to a telescope. Clockwise from top right: a waxing moon, the phases of Venus, the rings of Saturn (not yet confirmed to be rings), and Jupiter and its moons.

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.John Emslie

Planetary conga line (1851): By the middle of the 19th century, astronomers had done an impressive job of estimating relative sizes and locations. of the known planets, as shown in this British illustration from 1851. (The one exception: Neptune, which is about 30,000 miles across, or much smaller than the 50,000 miles given here.) Other elements of the illustration follow being artifacts of their time, especially the relative locations of the planets, which are expressed in how long it would take a cannonball fired from the sun to reach each.

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.NASA, JPL

The remarkable rings (2005): Science’s understanding of Saturn changed forever after the Cassini spacecraft, which ended its long mission in September 2017, began orbiting the Saturn system in 2004. This image of the planet’s rings is coded by colors to indicate the average size of the particles that make it up. each side Green, for example, indicates dust and ice particles less than a third of an inch in diameter. Purple indicates 2-inch particles. The ring system as a whole reaches 175,000 miles into space, or about 75% of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.NASA, JPL, Space Science Institute

Pass of the South (2000): On its way to Saturn, Cassini flew by Jupiter’s south pole, getting a speed boost from the planet’s gravity field. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is visible at 10 o’clock; a freckle of white ovals—the clearest at eight and nine—probably indicates deep atmospheric storms. As with all planetary flybys, the gravitational boost Cassini got didn’t come free. Jupiter accelerated the spacecraft thousands of miles per hour, and Cassini, in turn, slowed Jupiter’s orbit by a very small amount. Physics is picky about balancing its books.

UNDERSTANDING QUOTES

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial aircraft 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.unknown

dark miracles (c.1550): Comets are omens of terrible things, or so explained the 1550 German publication The Augsburg Book of Miracles. Each illustration represents the actual historical appearance of a comet, and each, the Augsburg text warns, was associated with calamities: snow in summer, plagues of locusts. The beauty of the illustrations betrays an acknowledgment of the beauty of the comets themselves, even if the wage of contemplating it was caused by death.

The sun is obscured by the moon during a solar eclipse, as seen from an Alaska Airlines commercial airplane 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Depoe Bay, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.ESA, Rosetta, MPS for Osiris Team MPS, UPD, LAM, IAA, SSO, INTA, UPM, DASP, IDA

Dirty snowball (2016): Science, unfortunately, isn’t always pretty, and never was that more evident than when the Rosetta spacecraft sent its Philae lander to the surface of comet 67P in 2016. The comet, a thing of light and beauty from the distance, is an icy comet. , tar up close. The bright crown and tail that give comets their appeal are the result of water and other volatile substances flowing from the surface in the presence of sunlight. But the further away from the sun a comet gets, the more rock it becomes. Philae, which landed in the shadow and quickly lost power when its solar cells failed, is still climbing aboard 67P.

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