Palomar Caltech News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell One of the bravest things that was ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope was to find a patch of sky with absolutely nothing in it -- no bright stars, no nebulae, and no known galaxies -- and observe it. Not just for a few minutes, or an hour, or even for a day. But orbit-after-orbit, for a huge amount of time, staring off into the nothingness of empty space, recording image after image of pure darkness.

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” -Edgar Allan Poe No matter where you look in the night sky, a powerful enough telescope appears to reveal points of light. Even if you find a region with no stars in the Milky Way, you’re likely to find thousands of galaxies in the deep sky beyond, as the Hubble Deep Field and successor images demonstrated. However, it wasn’t until 2010 and the WFC3 that we were able to get deep, wide-field views simultaneously.

We confidently state that the Universe is known to be 13.8 billion years old, with an uncertainty of just 1%. Here's how we know.

“Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.” -Ovid With all that we know of astronomy, with the hundreds of billions of galaxies and hundreds of billions of stars in each that we know are there, it might surprise you to learn that the stars -- for the most part -- don't segregate themselves by age, but rather live together in well-mixed populations.

NASA shares an Infrared photo of Nebula from the Orion constellation which is 1,500 light-years away. A new infrared lens was used to capture it.