Quotes to Keep: If you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arms length, that is the part of the universe you are seeing

Sunday, February 15, 2026

“What appears to be tiny specks in space are actually galaxies — billions of years old,” according to NPR.
“We’re looking back more than 13 billion years,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson explained during the event at the White House, according to the Washington Post. “Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and that light that you are seeing from one of those little specks, has been traveling for over 13 billion years.”
The image captures just a tiny portion of the universe. “If you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arms length, that is the part of the universe you are seeing — just one little speck of the universe,” Nelson said, according to NPR.
Washington Post science writer Joel Achenbach described it as “a hornet’s nest of brilliant but enigmatic objects in many colors. A smattering of stars have parked themselves in the foreground, but everything else is a galaxy — a vast agglomeration of stars, rendered into a small splash of light by the immense distances involved.”