Looking at Nothing

In 1996, scientist pointed the Hubble telescope at…nothing—an area of space near the Big Dipper no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm’s length that was believed to contain no stars, planets or galaxies. They watched the emptiness for 10 days.

In 2004, they did it again.  They pointed the Hubble telescope at absolutely nothing. This nothing was near Orion.  They watched it for 11 days.

Scientists wanted to take a close look at these empty pinholes in space to see if there might be a star hiding there.  So, they aimed the most powerful telescope in the world into the blackness, opened the shutter, and waited.  After hundreds of hours of exposure, they closed the shutter and started processing the images.

In this vast void of space, they found not one galaxy, not one star.

Not one, but in fact, more than thirteen thousands galaxies, and hundreds of billions of stars!  Photons had traveled for 13 billion years through empty space from these ancient stars before smashing into the telescope’s CCD, finally reporting with certainty that this empty space was not empty, but full of galaxies that we simply could not see without the Hubble.

In the dark times of our lives, we tend to see emptiness.  We fixate on the void.  We see nothing.  Nothing good, nothing hopeful, nothing bright.  In those times, we must remember to look deeper, to look with better eyes for the galaxies of hope and goodness that have always been there, but that we were just too blind to see.

Ultra Deep Field