Our galaxy, the Milky Way, probably looked like one of these smudges ten, fifteen billion years ago. So we're really looking at our origins, how we began, and we're looking back at a range of galaxy ages, and it's going to take, it's going to take many, many years probably to really get all the data out of this image. But what we've done is we've made this data available to the worldwide astronomical community. In fact, if you have access to Internet, you can pull it off your screen tonight. That's very dissimilar to the way most data is taken.
Most data is given to an astronomer and they have about a year to analyze it.
But we felt that we wanted the best minds in the world working on this because this really could be the rosetta stone of learning something about how galaxies evolved, how the largest ones of matter evolved over time. Well, every successful culture spends a tiny fraction of its money trying to gain knowledge, and I think understanding how the universe began and understanding how we got here is a very basic human question that was probably asked by the very first cave woman and cave man that walked out of their cave and looked at the sky. Well, I don't know about that. Well, what has to be done now, and this shows a synergy between space, space astronomy and ground base astronomy, what we need to do now is get actual distances to some of these objects because all we have here is a picture, which has an incredible amount of detail on that, but we need to know the distances of these objects to really understand which objects are young and which objects are old. To do that we're going to need the largest ground base telescopes on Earth, for instance, the 10-meter telescope, to take further observation of these things to try to understand the distances, so by combining work on the ground and these Hubble pictures we'll really get hopefully a better understanding of how the universe evolved in time.