Deep Distant Galaxies Captured by Hubble Telescope

BALTIMORE, Maryland, March 11, 2004 (ENS) - Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to record images of galaxies created at an earlier time in the history of the universe than anything seen before.

The images made public Tuesday show galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant ever known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old.

These oddball galaxies, that existed 800 million years after the big bang, when stars first started to shine, about 13 billion years ago. They chronicle a period when the universe was chaotic, when order and structure were just beginning to emerge, the astronomers say.

Two different shaped ancient galaxies are part of the deepest view of the universe seen by humans to date. (Photos courtesy NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team)

The Hubble Space Telescope exposure that recorded these very early galaxies took one million seconds.

The new image, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, is expected to offer new insights into what types of objects reheated the cold, dark universe about one billion years after the big bang,

The image reveals some galaxies at distances until now too faint to be seen even in Hubble's previous faraway looks, called the Hubble Deep Fields, taken in 1995 and 1998.

"Hubble takes us to within a stone's throw of the big bang itself," said Massimo Stiavelli of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who is leading the Hubble Ultra Deep Field project.

Astronomer Massimo Stiavelli of the Space Telescope Science Institute works behind a sterile mask. (Photo courtesy Space Telescope Science Institute)

Astronomers on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field project are attempting to determine whether the universe appears the same at this very early time as it does when the cosmos was between one and two billion years old.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies, but in ground-based images, the patch of sky in which the galaxies reside is largely empty, just one-tenth the diameter of the full moon.

Located in the constellation Fornax, the region is below the constellation Orion.

This new view is actually two separate images taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer (NICMOS). The combination of these two types of images will be used to search for galaxies that existed between 800 and 400 million years after the big bang.

Brilliant galaxy shines through the Hubble Space Telescope from 13 billion years ago (Photo courtesy NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team)

"The images will also help us prepare for the next step from NICMOS on Hubble to the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope. The NICMOS images reach back to the distance and time that Webb is destined to explore at much greater sensitivity," explained Rodger Thompson of the University of Arizona and the NICMOS principal investigator.

The ACS picture required a series of exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble Space Telescope orbits around Earth from September 24, 2003, to January 16, 2004.

The size of a phone booth, ACS captured ancient photons of light that began traversing the universe even before Earth existed. Photons of light from the very faintest objects arrived at a trickle of one photon per minute, as opposed to millions of photons per minute from nearer galaxies.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. under contract with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

See a spectrum of Hubble Ultra Deep Field images online by clicking here.