You know what scares me the most... The black space between the galaxies

yessss, Its absolutely nothing

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12546-biggest-void-in-space-is-1-billion-light-years-across/

There's just. so. much of it. Beyond the slightest inkling of comprehension.

I remember when I first saw the Hubble Deep Field. I stared at it for quite some time. I never felt scared though, just amazed. I can’t wait for more treasures from the JWST.

You are wondering about this picture. Just imagine, "light" needs 4.3 years to go from earth to the star nearest to our solar system. And there is nothing but "empty" space in between. Think about it for size.

Makes you feel incredibly small and worthless, we're just a blip that doesn't even matter, worries, influencers, finances, nothing matter in this huge place. Nature's awesome ♥️

Its.... nothing to worry about.....

The gravity lensing in this makes me imagine trying to head to it, only to find out it was somehwere else and light was just bent there by gravity causing travel routes, I would think, to be a little Swirly Dirly. Hopefully more people appreciate what hasn't been seen and make this cork screwing cosmic rollercoaster of a little blue marble a better place so that way we can atleast live to know Life will spread. Imagine in the future a kid on his history test says "What planet did humans originate"

Soooo many intelligent life forms have probably evolved, lived, and gone extinct in the billions of years the universe has been kicking around. We're just another one. Fumbling along in the dark cold vastness.

It helps me to remember not to take myself or others too seriously. We're all just space dust in the cosmic wind.

I've always been scared of space, I can just imagine waking up on a different planet, Different laws of physics, maybe even different types of life

exactly, we are nothing

that's crazy to think about, Imagine in 1000 years from now how advanced technology is going to get and how much we are going to discover

Just makes me think, the stuff that makes me upset, the stuff that ruins my day. Is completely worthless and we have nothing to worry about. Doesn't matter what happens nothing is going to change in the universe.

billions of light years

Makes me wonder how many alien civilizations are there in that image, saddens me that i probably won't be able to meet our cosmic brothers

Sure is, there is either millions/billions ( maybe even more) civilizations, maybe just a few, maybe none. All equally as terrifying

From reading/watching material. They were discussing a solar telescope, using the sun's mass to act as a lense and see the light that gets bent around the sun. You could probably see things on planets in a detailed fashion. Then introduce the theory of a ship that is able to travel faster than light because space gets pulled through it.

Now combine the two, if you can travel faster than light without actually breaking the speed limit of light and have that telescope. Depending on where you place that device, you could see light before it reaches there.

This would make viewing actual history unfold since its the light of the past that the device would be getting ahead of.

Violent apes is what they probably call us to be honest.

What you see here is a fraction of heaven and hell combined

wtfff, that's insane

Want me to make it worse? Imagine that a version of you exists in quite a few of them...

I'm going to be mean, so look away ...

There are vast regions of space where you could be floating (in a space suit) with no gravity and no light that you could see. Just endless, boundless darkness, with no direction. There are planets around solitary stars where the night sky is just black, and if you lived on one there would be no astronomy and nobody would have any notion of a larger universe.

"Vast" doesn't capture the scale

Imagine sitting on a couch and decide to watch Italy 1521, but then got bored so you decide to switch to Feudal Japan 1190

What should scare you is the huge unseen thing in the middle of the picture causing all of the gravitational lensing

It scares me too. But I am also curious and fascinated by it. To me, it's like the ocean but scarier because we have no idea of where or if it ends.

I think about that every day when I get stressed out. We’re truly nothing and all my worries in life don’t matter.

Different laws of physics? Physics applies everywhere in the universe

^unless ^we ^are ^projections

And it just keeps getting bigger, faster than the speed of light

As far as we can determine yes, but we are not positive. There have been speculations that some of the "constants" have even changed over time since the big bang, which could have ramifications with regards to inflation, etc

Exact opposite. We are absolute miracles. We are so lucky to have the awareness to experience this. Too many people are buried under their ego's self obsession and miss out on that fact.

His implication is that we could go to another planet and the physics could be different. That's fundamentally untrue. Constants like how the electroweak force changed to electromagnetism and weak force? That fits into our theories of physics as is.

All that in a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand.

Lol!! I believe that would be the whitish blob looking foreground galaxy with accompanying unseen super massive black hole

These pictures always amazes me that how vast our universe is and we know absolutely nothing about it.

Right, what he implied wouldn't happen but I was referring to things like this: https://www.science.org/content/article/are-laws-physics-changing

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/are-the-laws-of-physics-really-universal/

and not just the consolidation of the fundamental forces.

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Thank you. This is the mindset we should have. The fact that we can think and reason and have the range of emotions that we do is nothing short of miraculous.

Just because math allows for a thing doesn't mean we see it represented in our universe... and yes the laws of physics are absolute to our entire observable universe thus far. When we see something that doesn't aline, it's because we messed up something, not that the universe is changing itself.

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Rogue stars fascinate me. The ones wandering between galaxies.

Edit: I think they are interesting because life can evolve on planets orbiting these stars. Other than parent star, there will hardly be any radiation risk, or supernova, neutron, x-ray or gamma ray bursts. If star have multiple planet, they may be observable in night sky but nothing much else it would be creepy. It will be much easier to conclude sky like a dome with bright shiny dots on it at night in such system. If at all these civilizations develop telescopes, they may still get views of far away galaxies.

genuinely asking as a question and not trying to challenge you because I have no clue, but how can we be in anyway certain that the laws of physics that work on our planet and surrounding galaxy, are held throughout the universe? I'd like to think things could be very different elsewhere.

Imagine someone in the future sitting on their couch watching you now.

When they release an image of an exoplanet's night side, showing city lights...

It does scare me, but then you ground yourself and you just can't really worry about it. On the day to day, what's here on Earth is what's important.

I get really sad sometimes thinking of the billions of alien life that has most likely evolved and went extinct perhaps on planets with no intelligent life to document and remember them. On this planet we had everything from tyrannosaurus rex to hamsters - imagine the extremes of life in the billions of planets out there. Creatures bigger, meaner, more impressive than anything we have every seen. Imagine knowing how they hunt, how they cooperate, what they are capable of.

Also intelligent life. Imagine the cities, the culture, music, art, dance, science that has been lost. I can listen to some music and it almost brings me to tears, imagine the beauty that could have been created by other species that we'll never hear. Sad.

Maybe, if their into watching someone bum around the house.

Just pass down instructions to, in the future, view a certain point in time when you're giving the finger.

Doesn't scare me at all. I think it's fascinating.

‘ if we are the only intelligent life forms existed in this time….. that would be a terrible waste of space ‘

I have this as my desktop pic; I also have a print of it hanging in my bedroom. I am always in awe of the vastness and complexity of our universe and the infinite opportunities to discover new things.

Dust or miracles? Both perhaps?

What about the rogue planets? They can be wondering between solar systems or even galaxies, sometimes at incredible speeds if say they had a narrow escape from a black hole. And should one pass through or even just close enough to our solar system it would make a very handy space ship! If course we would have to be ready to go hop on as it passed, and you don't get to choose where you go.

Right now there could be a civilisation who managed to survive on a planet with no star! Just wondering through space, the planet core slowly cooling providing the bear minimum, but if they are clever enough they could split the atom and live in total comfort, until their version of Putin ruined it (how did this get political?) 🙉

I can't even imagine just nothing, not even seeing the hand in front of your face.

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Yep, once we learn a better way of getting places than very large firework's. Some promising current tech are things like nuclear electric, we use ion thrusters now, they are super efficient but low thrust for now. A fusion breakthrough would help a lot. But we could realistically get up to 0.2C (1/8 of light speed) but possibly that would be something like nano probes with light sails on a laser high way in a long row of thousands of individual probes and a signal is relayed back along (see Breakthrough starshot) That would reasonably get us closer up data of surrounding solar systems in a reasonable time.

As a child, I was lying on my back at night, wondering about space. Sputnik was new. Everything was new. My dad tells me about Russians and the space race and the moon, solar system, galaxies, etc. A bit freaked out by now…. Then, dad says “We’re not looking up at the stars, we’re looking down. Good night”. Changed everything for me.

You just broke causality and that's forbidden! The speed of light is not just a suggestion!

I find it exciting. All those pixels are a near infinate set of possibilities.

Did you consider how much of the sky that image covers? Hold a grain of rice out at arms length, that much sky and that's generous, every single direction is the same right out to our cosmic horizon, and that is simply an arbitrary distance due to the speed of light and the expansion of the space in between. There is every reason to assume that it just continues forever! Much of the universe, in fact likely most of the universe will forever be invisible from us because the light will never arrive here! The space between the galaxies is expanding, once you get above a certain distance the cumulative expansion exceeds the speed of light! There is so much stuff, so many mysteries.

The pale blue dot image gets me the same way. Then you remember that the Voyager spacecraft was practically on our doorstep when it took the image, just one six thousandth the distance to the nearest star. And then you look at the James Webb deep field image...

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This picture is so weird to me, it looks like a 11 year old discovered Microsoft paint and pasted their selection of astrological pieces on a black background.

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Whats even crazier is that a grain of sand at arms length would block this entire photo. That is a mind-blowing amount of galaxies in just one area of the universe.

Not to feed your astrophobia... But even the distance our voyager 1 is currently from earth, never to return, not to touch or even see physical astronomical bodies for at least the coming million years.. is already unfathomable for the human mind.. the kind of scales you're currently describing are actually Unfathomable to the power of a million.

He said 4.3light years anon, not billion.

And to put it into scale a lightyear is roughly 100Trillion kilometer.

To put that into scale

Light travels in 8 minutes from the sun to our earth traveling a rough 91million kilometers

To put that into scale

If light would travel our planet 8 times around (roughly 300.000km) it would take light 1 second.

To put that into scale

Usain Bolt is currently the fastest man to ever walk 100 meters in roughly 9seconds, if he could keep that pace it would still take him

If he would run at max speed he would take +/- 6.666hours Just over 277days straight of walking that pace To go the distance light would in a single second.

I'd rather put it in another perspective.

We are the result of 14 billion years of star collapsing, super novi, physics defining, galaxy creating pandemonium.

We are the part of the universe that is actually able to perceive itself, gaze upon it's awing, jawdropping beauty.

We are the Universe being aware of itself

Maybe this is what happens when we die. You respawn in a different galaxy with different rules

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Well the physics WE know applies most places in the universe. But in an earlier life I went to some places where the physics is different and ours does not apply. Are we projections? No, WE are real, the entire universe is projection we have imagined.

Yep, the distances are really unfathomable to me. The CLOSEST star is 4.3 light years away and light travels at over one billion kilometers per hour (I believe).

Then imagine the afterlife and reincarnation is linked to the whole universe

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I mean, give us a little credit. You sound like one of those Christian fundamentalist guys (just saying)

I felt the same way when I first learned about the Bootes Void. A gigantic sphere in which very few galaxies exist. It's called the Great Nothing. Imagine how life must feel there. Total isolation.

You should watch the series "Expanse", its one of the most realistic Sci Fi series I have watched. There, you will realize that travelling inside our solar system, specially to the outer planets, is also too long.

I don’t get why any of that is scary though. What’s scary about big? What’s scary about potential life? Why is the poor Milky Way scary?

Miracle dust, not to confused with the angel kind

Fear subsides when you accept our outer rim overlords.

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Perhaps what you are afraid of is the thrill and the awe that rises when you see it. Not much in our lives prepares us for that and so few people feel it.

Scariest picture of space to me would be all those stars but a visible black void of darkness, makes you wonder if its a black hole that's is incredibly large or something more sinister.

It would be the entire galaxy causing it, not the SMBH which would have relatively minimal mass.

Physics will be the same no matter where you go, just some of the values would be different for gravity.

Competition and scarcity drive evolution.

Aside from some global hive mind species it’s likely that all intelligent species will have at least one stage like ours.

I mean there’s a reason you used the term apes - our closest common ancestor.

While this doesn’t speak the immensity of space, it addresses the immensity of time. Equally scary.

Timelapse of the Future https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA

Edit: correct space to time

Same. I don't understand why people feel scared. I find it awe inspiring, and even comforting. And we're only viewing our visible universe in this photo, of theoretically infinite parallel universes/multiverse yet.

An 11 billion year old God pasted bits of his/her/it's imagination onto the empty void, one galaxy after another for nearly infinite time, sighed contentedly, and went back to sleep.

This is a more common concept in the multi-verse model, comparing between universes, not within a single universe.

How about "really, really vast"?

One of the books in the four-volume set "The World of Mathenatics" (ca. 1950's?) tells of a junior high school math class conjuring the number "google" as the number of raindrops falling on Brooklyn in an hour of steady rain, and a "googleplex" as a google raised to the google power. Mind: POW!

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I have seen well developed theories that the speed of light varies over time, but not from place to place.

My head hurts thinking about how large the universe is things seem to be finite but at such a large number it’s practically infinite.

It’s terrifying and beautiful at the same time. I really appreciate these pictures because space helps me realize that I should just enjoy my life. I wish more people would just take a second and look up more.

We are here to protect you

from the terrible secret of space

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E0ot9iJm_k

Pak Chooie Unf

Fwiw, the laws of physics are consistent throughout the observable universe 👍

I think this is scary because it shows us galaxies that formed as early as 100 million years after the Big Bang. That's way, way earlier than we had predicted, which means we have to significantly reassess our view of the early years of the cosmos.

That's what scary; that we may have made some big mistakes in our theory of the early universe.

>That's what scary; that we may have made some big mistakes in our theory of the early universe.

I don't think it's scary, that's the simple development from theories in science.

More, if you find inaccuracies in your models, you can develop it.

A famous example are the relativity in classic systems by Galileo and the axioms from newton which are developed to SRT/ART. And i don't think this is the end.

Edith says: so, i'm every time happy, when big theories are false in some kinds, so you can improve it or find new theories.

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One funny thing I read was “when you see a star in the night sky just think, that light travelled for millions of years at the speed of light without being stopped by anything until your eyeball got in its way”

I mean to understand the scale that is pointed in one direction…

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another anecdote is,

"A star which we see today must have emitted that light billions of years ago, at the same time when Dinosaurs roamed the earth. To a planet roaming around that star, our sun would be another star. Any one seeing our sun from that distance would see the light emitted by our sun billions of year ago.

So, much so that, if they were using similar telescopes like us, they would actually see dinosaurs, and not us."

Its actually overwhelming and mindblowing to even think that way.

I look at this picture and it reminds me of my complete and absolute insignificance and I find it oddly comforting

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Physics should be the same throughout the entire universe

Chances that there could be life on a rogue planet would be nearly none. A planet that is probably frozen solid because it doesn’t have a heat source at all. It would have no atmosphere either so it would be constantly bombarded by radiation and other harmful things that would kill anything living on it.

There are quantum theories that state when you die, your consciousness will move to a different universe.

This for sure. It’s so amazing to imagine what is actually out there. It’s kind of sad that we will never know ourselves because we will die before technology advances enough to explore and find out all those unanswered questions.

>w

That's something to think about....

And the fact that the star were actually seeing is probably dead and gone already as well.

Well that kind of makes me think, as we are looking up at the sky we are technically looking at infinite space. We can't see it but there is still no end.

THATS WHAT IVE BEEN THINKING, what if there is an exact world like ours, if space is infinite, that's infinite possibilities

Also what kind of life. When we think of aliens, most people just think of aliens we’ve seen in movies and what not. Being on other planets may not even be carbon based life. They could be almost anything other than the forms we normally think of. There’s some weird life forms on this planet, like the stuff we see in deep oceans, but there could be literally anything making up life on other planets in the universe.

Did not know that! my science teacher taught me that a while ago

Exactly what I've been thinking, Dying is a scary thing to think about, How we are even alive and have our own bodies (if that makes sense) its just crazy. When we die is it just black? do we go to an after life? do we wake up in a different galaxy? Its not like when we die its just nothing, it seems impossible for us to never be conscious

Not to mention; In all that vastness, in all that incomprehensible time, out of all of that, random molecules got together right here and right now to make Us.

I dont feel small. I feel incredibly and astoundingly lucky.

Or the other main idea also means it has no end but is finite, basically the 3 dimensions of space could curve around, like Pac Man running off the right side of the screen and appearing in the left. Only the curvature is so slight that from our scale we cannot detect it, the cosmic horizon being such an insignificant fraction of the whole we cannot picture the universe being round!

Yes; 1,079,252,848.8 k/h in a vacuum :)

Galaxies are the same everywhere. Those galaxies we just found from jwst are surprisingly well formed for that early tho. Which means we are missing something or over/under estimated are models of expansion. But these images are far more precise than before with near infra-red observations. So where before we were just drawing the outline of our portrait, now we are starting to fill in the details. It's more precise, and more likely to miss perfection. That's never bad though, the best parts of science are the anomalies.

And the universe isn't very different actually. It's surprising uniform in temperature. And when modelled with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation, our universal distribution of galaxies looks like what would result from those very tiny temperature fluctuations early on.

The physics didn't change, the temperature did... allowing for more advanced elements to be created. The temperature changed because of inflation and the dissipation of energy resulting from that expansion. Heat is basically just the friction of things bouncing into each other. So the more room you have, the less things will hit each other, and as a result, decrease temperature. The universe atm is 2.7 Kelvin and its only getting colder... very, very slowly. Weird thing is, the universe is still inflating, and even wilder, that inflation is accelerating.

My favorite quote on fiction... make believe has to be believable, reality rarely is.

Not to mention all the cloaked ships you cant see that are heading for earth.

Like many others, Michio Kaku, co-founder of string field theory (aka superstring theory), would suggest there's an intelligence behind it, that's it's not by chance. In his opinion of course, since it's not the kind of thing that's possible to prove when the rules of the game forbid it.

A sufficiently high amount of radioactive material in a world with a molten core is not impossible, the by-product of radioactive decay is heat. After all a good amount of the Earths heat is still residual from the planets accretion. Or there could be a gravitational influence such as large satellites gravitationally bound, the tidal forces producing heat from friction. And that's leaving aside a technologically advanced civilisation who can split atoms for power. Also an atmosphere could certainly survive even if just trapped below surface.

Regarding radiation, a strong magnetic field from a molten metal core should do the trick!

"theories" = stoner rambling.

No need to be scared those galaxies are billions and billions of light years away.

Tell me you wanna be a boltzmann brain without telling me you wanna be a boltzmann brain....

Nice link thanks!

I very much feel the same actually.

Something kicked the whole thing off, after all. Someday we may discover what or who? that was.

I don’t think a planet like that wound be rotating enough to keep a constant magnetic field like earth does though. Too many inconsistencies with a rogue planet like that would effect all of that. Also I don’t think intelligent life would be able to live with all those inconsistencies as well. Life on earth formed and evolved because earth was relatively constant with weather and conditions. A planet not in an orbit could go from being frozen, to super hot passing by another star, so life wouldn’t be able to adapt and evolve.

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I don't think we have much to worry about from civilizations in any of those galaxies

Better answer is that they could live inside it, and use a combination of fission and fusion for energy

Billions and billions and billions of light years away. Trillions of billions. Like, so far. Backwards and forwards and inbetween space and time in terms of how large this is. You could float away into it in every direction and completely dissolve into nothingness into the vast void. Absolutely nothing to be afraid of at all. Just look up and think about how far away it truly is. Give in to all that space, now.

I mean, I guess Einstein could have been a stoner.

There are also people who believe their magic sky daddy will take them to heaven. There's zero evidence of consciousness existing separate from the brain.

I think after the event that sent it apart from it's star it would settle into a very stable state, space is vast, the odds of it coming close enough to another star close enough to benefit from it's heat output would likely be it's death due to gravitational shear.

>They can be wondering between solar systems or even galaxies, sometimes at incredible speeds if say they had a narrow escape from a black hole. And should one pass through or even just close enough to our solar system it would make a very handy space ship! If course we would have to be ready to go hop on as it passed, and you don't get to choose where you go.

Alert Hollywood. I HAVE A SCRIPT!

It's kind of like the little watched "Space 1999", but with modern special effects and a whole world to work with vs just a moon base, I think we've potential.

It’s not impossible, just very very unlikely.

It has been in a book or two, but that is no reason to stop now!

I love that something called "super massive" is considered a realtively trivial contributor to the overall gravity of most galaxies.

There isn’t, but the theories from physicists have way more value than the theories that have no proof at all, like religion.

It was a take on Carl Sagan's tag line!

Eh. I'll give you "more", but not "way more". It's purely speculative. I don't put any stock in the idea that the universe needs "an observer" to function.

Possibly. But would life have time to evolve into some kind of intelligent form in that span though? In earths 4 billion or so years, we have barely evolved into intelligent life to barely touch the moon. Obviously there could have been life forms that evolve faster and discover technology faster than we have, but I still think it’s very unlikely.

Also I find it very sad that we will never find out the answers to everything we’re discussing.

How about ...

“Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.”

The JWKST as you say is powerful. Is seems the magnitude and incredibility of our known universe is too powerful for you. Maybe bird watching might be more suitable.

I’m willing to actually trust a physicists theories as opposed to some religious persons theory (if you can even call it a theory) though. The physicist would actually be able to give you reasonings as to why what they’re saying could be true as opposed to someone from religion just saying to believe them with no proof at all.

Wow... ok... I link to a couple of articles (could have linked more) where physicists discuss the possibility that the thing we call the "laws of physics" may not be as immutable as once thought and you respond with:

>the laws of physics are absolute to our entire observable universe thus far

You realize that we don't even know what 95%+ of the universe even is right? These "laws of physics" you are so certain about only explain 4-5% of the matter/energy we are aware of.

I think I'll take the opinion of a well known physicist like Sean Carroll over some guy on Reddit.

I think we all are far more self-absorbed than we realize. It can be shocking (and I don’t doubt scary) to suddenly go from feeling like the center of the universe, and the most important thing in it to feeling incredibly small and insignificant. On top of that there’s a realization that however insignificant we feel in that moment, it’s actually so much greater than that, and our small and insignificant brains can’t even begin to compute the complexity and vastness of it all. I have experienced this intense and shocking sensation many times. And then I quickly go back to being self-absorbed.

I read your comment in Sagan's voice

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You mean the theoretical physicist Sean Carroll? Remind me what that field entails again? Observations? Or maths that may or may not have application within our own universe? You have literally no idea what you are talking about. Until you do, don't come with a YouTube video that baits pot heads into thinking they are growing...

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Who knows. Nobody knows. Perhaps we never will know

man those are galaxies , i find the picture freaking amazing

A hypothetical "Warp Drive" pulls space through it so you aren't moving faster than light, you are choosing how much space siphons through it to arrive at your destination.

Yes, but once there you could relay information, that information could then be acted on before light could have transmitted it. That's not actually a problem, but if another plus light speed trip took that information to certain places (as described on the Penrose diagram as in violation of causality) then they could use that information to, well I don't actually know, I believe in the speed of light!

It’s what’s called infinity. Grains of sand = stars in the sky

Astrophobia sounds like the modern way of adding a word with “phobia” and boom there it is

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And you have to remember what your looking at isn’t now… your looking at what used to be… depending on how far away the galaxy is the further back in time you go when looking at that image…

> Let me start off by those are all galaxies

Actually some of the brightest objects are stars in the Milky Way.

Do you happen to recall any of those book titles?

You have a phobia of space? Man do I have some bad news.