The Universe: Now in 3D!

I recently stumbled across an amazing youtube video, and decided to share it with whoever stumbles across this.

Some things to keep in mind:

• For the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), the Hubble telescope was staring at a patch of sky the size of a tennis ball 100 meters away.
• The original paper written on the HDF was cited over 800 times in scientific journals by 2008.

• The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) is a picture of a patch of sky smaller than a 1 mm by 1 mm square of paper held 1 meter away.
  
• This is roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky.
• In this tiny part of the heavens, enough galaxies were discovered to account for around 1 quadrillion stars: about the number of pennies in this picture.
  
• The HUDF is looking back nearly 13 billion years ago, at some of the first galaxies to exist.
• Both of the fields strengthened belief in the cosmological principle - the premise that the earth is in a typical, insignificant position in the universe - an idea that was unthinkable 1,000 years ago.
• It's quite possible that there are many more galaxies farther away than the most distant specks seen in the HUDF, but the universe is too young for their light to have reached us by now. In fact, many cosmologists believe that, were the actual universe many times larger than the part of it we can see, this would solve many perennial problems in cosmology.

Note: in layman's terms, the last link is basically saying that cosmology has determined the observable universe to be almost perfectly flat. But this didn't have to be the case; in fact it requires a seemingly improbably set of circumstances, and an even more unlikely set of circumstances to have been the case at the beginning of the universe for it to be flat today. One well accepted solution to this problem is that the universe is not flat; it is curved, but the observable universe is such a tiny part of the whole universe that even the most precise, expensive scientific instruments read it as being nearly perfectly flat - sort of like how your backyard looks flat even though it's part of a large sphere.