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Glossary term: Cosmos

Description: Le terme cosmos évoque la splendeur de l'ensemble des choses et a de profondes racines philosophiques. Bien que le terme cosmos soit utilisé comme synonyme d'univers, il existe des différences subtiles entre les deux. Cosmos vient du mot grec kosmos, qui implique grosso modo l'harmonie ou l'ordre. Il s'agit d'un terme global désignant l'agencement ordonné d'un système, dont l'Univers fait partie. Toutefois, on pourrait affirmer que l'Univers est lui-même un système ordonné et qu'il peut donc être désigné comme le cosmos. Étant donné que les systèmes ordonnés peuvent, dans une certaine mesure, être décrits par des lois physiques, le mot "cosmos" peut être étendu à l'idée d'un monde qui peut être expliqué par des lois physiques.

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Term and definition status: The original definition of this term in English have been approved by a research astronomer and a teacher
The translation of this term and its definition is still awaiting approval

The OAE Multilingual Glossary is a project of the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education (OAE) in collaboration with the IAU Office of Astronomy Outreach (OAO). The terms and definitions were chosen, written and reviewed by a collective effort from the OAE, the OAE Centers and Nodes, the OAE National Astronomy Education Coordinators (NAECs) and other volunteers. You can find a full list of credits here. All glossary terms and their definitions are released under a Creative Commons CC BY-4.0 license and should be credited to "IAU OAE".

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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field showing around 10,000 galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes and colours.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Caption: This awe-inspiring image referred to as the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF), was obtained using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), by combining 800 exposures from 400 orbits of the HST, which equates to 11.3 days of total exposure time. The image shows nearly 10,000 galaxies and was taken in the direction of a patch of sky with the least amount of stars from the Milky Way galaxy in the field of view. The region of sky that the HST observed corresponds to 1/10 the angular size of the Full Moon, which is roughly equal to approximately a 1 millimeter-sized object placed 1 meter away. Every object in the image, except for the bright points with the crosshairs, are galaxies. As a consequence of the speed of light being a constant in a vacuum, the more distant an object, the further back in time we are observing. Therefore, the light from some of the galaxies in the HUDF image is from when the Universe as only a few hundred million years old. The HUDF image takes us through on a journey through space, and also in time.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team credit link

License: CC-BY-4.0 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) icons