The controversy of the Hubble Deep Field image #shorts

By Dr. Becky

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In 1995, one scientist made a decision that his colleagues thought was a catastrophic waste of the world's most expensive telescope! That scientist was the director of the Hubble Space Telescope, Robert Williams, who decided to do something that hadn’t been done before. He took Hubble, the most powerful telescope at the time, and pointed it at a tiny patch of completely dark, apparently empty sky. And he kept it there for over 100 hours across 10 consecutive days. And there was a lot of pushback at the time over doing that, with people claiming he was wasting telescope time, because distant galaxies wouldn’t be bright enough for Hubble to spot. But what Hubble actually found would change all of astronomy. Ten thousand galaxies. In a patch of sky just 2% of the size of the full Moon. It suggested for the first time that there could be over hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable Universe. But what made this image even more powerful was that Williams did something almost unhe