"That very first Hubble deep field image was revolutionary," said Morgan Van Arsdall, systems and deputy program manager for the Hubble Space Telescope at Lockheed Martin. A seemingly blank section of the sky had turned out to hold a menagerie of galaxies far, far away. At the time, it was as if humanity had seen as far as it could see.īut soon after, in 1995, Hubble broke its own record when NASA publicly released its first incredible deep field. This was visual proof of our universe's evolution, courtesy of a telescope we'd just flung into space. Soon, Meyer realized what he was looking at. Among galaxies that were carbon copies of what you might find in an astronomer's imagination were many that didn't look like the wispy spirals or ellipticals characteristic of realms closer to ours. "You'd see these weird things," said Meyer, a Northwestern University professor focused on Hubble discoveries. It had finally begun to reveal the deep universe - and what it found was unbelievable. They were from the Hubble Space Telescope.
He found himself staring at dark backgrounds scattered with deceptively small galaxies, floating at distances the human mind simply cannot grasp. "What is that?" Meyer exclaimed, aware of an echo. In the early '90s, on a trip to the Space Telescope Science Institute, Dave Meyer was met with an air of exhilaration and an urgent tone.Įlsewhere in the building, image after image was being downloaded onto closely monitored screens - and with each one, scientist onlookers grew conscious of their breathing.
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