Don't blink
What you see now is one of the top 10 photos taken by the Hubble telescope, the "Pillar of Creation" where horror and beauty coexist.
It is located 6500 light years away in the Eagle Nebula, which is formed by the condensation of a large amount of interstellar dust under the action of gravity, these colorful colors, representing different substances in the nebula, and inside these columns, are juvenile stars waiting for the day of birth, so these columnar nebulae are called pillars of creation.
However, astronomers believe that the Pillar of Creation is likely to be no longer there, because observations from the Hubble Telescope show that there was a supernova explosion near the Pillar of Creation, and the chain reaction has washed away the Pillar of Creation, and what we see now is only the remnants of its 6,500-year-old image.
What you see now is the Cat's Eye Nebula, 3,000 light-years from Earth, located in the direction of the constellation Draco in the Earth's night sky, named because of its shape that looks like a cat's eye.
This picture is called the Hubble Extreme Deep Space Field, which is the deep sky image of the universe that the Hubble telescope finally obtained after several months of long exposure, and every bright spot you see now is not a star, but a galaxy like the Milky Way, each galaxy has at least 100 billion stars, and it is conservatively estimated that there are at least 10,000 galaxies in this picture, and they occupy only 12.7 million times the area of the whole day.
Therefore, astronomers believe that there are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe with a diameter of 93 billion light-years, and that the Milky Way and the solar system, as well as us on Earth, are just a drop in the ocean in the universe.
At present, the Hubble telescope has photographed the farthest galaxy, which is 13.2 billion light-years away from the Earth, which also means that we are seeing what it looked like 13.2 billion years ago, when the Big Bang had just passed, and the universe was still in its infancy, so cosmology is actually cosmic archaeology, and the farther Hubble looks, the closer it is to the Big Bang.
If it weren't for the Hubble Telescope, we might never have seen these galaxies in distant areas, although it is now long dying, but in his career, he has brought us countless exquisite images of the cosmic starry sky, which has refreshed mankind's understanding of the entire universe again and again.
According to NASA's plan, the Hubble telescope should have been retired as early as 2005, and the Webb telescope would have succeeded it at that time, but due to Webb's ill-fated repeated delays and the Hubble telescope in very good condition, the Hubble telescope is still on the job to this day, and astronomers even believe that it will work until 2030.
More importantly, the main observation band of the current Webb telescope is in the mid-infrared, rather than visible light, so the photos we see of the Webb telescope are very different from the Hubble telescope in color, and only the images captured by the Hubble telescope are the closest to the color of the universe seen by the human eye, so the Hubble telescope will shoot more targets in the future, complement the Webb telescope, and explore the universe together.
However, whether it is Hubble or Webb, they can see galaxies tens of millions of light-years away, but they can't see any high-definition images of exoplanets, because their aperture is still too small, some astronomers believe that in the future, we can use the gravitational lensing phenomenon of the earth and even the sun, place observation equipment at a suitable distance, so as to obtain a super telescope, its aperture is equivalent to the entire earth or the sun, and theoretically can directly see the surface of Proxima Centauri b.
If this kind of gravitational lensing telescope really appears in the future, human civilization may not be able to launch probes and find traces left by extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe.