Interesting tidbit: Deepest space images to date
March 9, 2004
NOTE: The images mentioned were not archived by the wayback machine, so I couldn’t reconstruct the article fully.
AP reports today that the people at the Space Telescope Science Institute have made a long-exposure snapshot with hubble of what is now the deepest-ever universe image is features “a point just a few hundred million years from the Big Bang”.
Click read more for the images and more info. The AP article is here.
These images depict about 10,000 galaxies and show what happened “just a few hundred million years from the Big Bang”, the youngest stars are shown from back then the universe was just about at 5% of it’s current age.
“For the first time, we’re looking back at stars that are forming out of the depths of the Big Bang,” Beckwith said. “We’re seeing the youngest stars within a stone’s throw of the beginning of the universe.”
The images were collected by focusing the Hubble’s instruments at a single point in the sky for 1 million seconds, an exposure that took more than 400 orbits of the space telescope.
Beckwith said finding the faintest objects in the long-term exposure, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, is like trying to collect the light from a firefly hovering over the moon.
The images were collected over four months starting last September.
The portion in the sky imaged by the Hubble was very small and astronomers compared it to looking at the sky through an 8-foot long soda straw.
Researchers will now take the images and search for the most distant objects and study the 10,000 galaxies, some of which are in bizarre and unusual shapes.
Note: Source of pictures and story: Associated Press. Click images to enlarge
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