Pale, Dusty Dots
From the author's Twitter post: "One of my favorite kinds of image is one where it doesn’t look like much… until you understand what you’re seeing.
For example: Just a bunch of dots, right? But every single one of those dots *is an entire galaxy*.
And there are a lot of dots. A LOT." (Tweet)
The image is from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey. And because the survey wasn't able to look at every point in the sky, for every dot you see here, there are 200 more across the sky Herschel wasn't able to see, for a total of some 17 million galaxies.
And even that is a pittance compared to the estimated 2 trillion galaxies filling the universe.
You know, somehow I don't think I'm going to run out of story ideas anytime soon....😋