Hubble produces Extreme Deep Field image, showing 5 500 galaxies as old as 13.2 billion years
60 replies, posted
[t]http://imgkk.com/i/5ep-.jpg[/t]
[url]http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/xdf.html[/url]
[quote=NASA]Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe.
Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time.
[B]The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.[/B]
Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do the large, fuzzy red galaxies where the formation of new stars has ceased. These red galaxies are the remnants of dramatic collisions between galaxies and are in their declining years. Peppered across the field are tiny, faint, more distant galaxies that were like the seedlings from which today's magnificent galaxies grew. The history of galaxies -- from soon after the first galaxies were born to the great galaxies of today, like our Milky Way -- is laid out in this one remarkable image.
[B]Hubble pointed at a tiny patch of southern sky in repeat visits (made over the past decade) for a total of 50 days, with a total exposure time of 2 million seconds.[/B] More than 2,000 images of the same field were taken with Hubble's two premier cameras: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3, which extends Hubble's vision into near-infrared light.
"The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before", said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2009 (HUDF09) program.
[B]The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time.[/B] Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars extraordinarily brighter than our sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a "time tunnel into the distant past." [B]The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the universe's birth in the big bang.[/B]
Before Hubble was launched in 1990, astronomers could barely see normal galaxies to 7 billion light-years away, about halfway across the universe. Observations with telescopes on the ground were not able to establish how galaxies formed and evolved in the early universe.
Hubble gave astronomers their first view of the actual forms and shapes of galaxies when they were young. This provided compelling, direct visual evidence that the universe is truly changing as it ages. Like watching individual frames of a motion picture, the Hubble deep surveys reveal the emergence of structure in the infant universe and the subsequent dynamic stages of galaxy evolution.
[B]The infrared vision of NASA's planned James Webb Space Telescope will be aimed at the XDF.[/B] The Webb telescope will find even fainter galaxies that existed when the universe was just a few hundred million years old. Because of the expansion of the universe, light from the distant past is stretched into longer, infrared wavelengths. The Webb telescope's infrared vision is ideally suited to push the XDF even deeper, into a time when the first stars and galaxies formed and filled the early "dark ages" of the universe with light.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.[/quote]
It's so cool, yet the thought that this generation won't probably live to explore these strange, new worlds, saddens me a little
[QUOTE=Limed00d;37805906]It's so cool, yet the thought that this generation won't probably live to explore these strange, new worlds, saddens me a little[/QUOTE]I plan to.
Yada yada Doppler effect, I'm still surprised by the amount of blueshift in the background.
The fact I'll never go to space makes me really sad.
If I ever had a chance to explore the stars, I would have made the effort to do stuff like high level maths and chemistry in high school
[QUOTE=Limed00d;37805906]It's so cool, yet the thought that this generation won't probably live to explore these strange, new worlds, saddens me a little[/QUOTE]
We should probably explore our own world a bit more :v:
[editline]26th September 2012[/editline]
as individuals.
[QUOTE=WhatAmI;37805950]If I ever had a chance to explore the stars, I would have made the effort to do stuff like high level maths and chemistry in high school[/QUOTE]
Pardon me, but what a terrible excuse. I get the fact that ambitions improve motivation and grades, but the fact is that to the stars to begin with we need people willing to step that extra mile. A nation of people unwilling to work for goals that don't exist yet is a nation that never succeeds at any goals.
More importantly, the field is at the frontier of exploratory knowledge. We learn new, fantastic stuff every day. Sure, you can't physically go there, but you can learn mind-numbing, unknowable things already. The people who do this are explorers in heart and mind, despite being glued to this magnificent planet.
Imagine what the James Webb telescope can do compared to Hubble.
[QUOTE][IMG]http://ksj.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/tracker/2010/james_webb_space_telescope.jpg[/IMG][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][IMG]http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/images/screen/jwst_poster01.jpg[/IMG][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][IMG]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/James_Webb_Space_Telescope_Mirror37.jpg[/IMG][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][IMG]http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42547000/gif/_42547199_hubble_webb_416.gif[/IMG][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=mac338;37805989]Pardon me, but what a terrible excuse. I get the fact that ambitions improve motivation and grades, but the fact is that to the stars to begin with we need people willing to step that extra mile. A nation of people unwilling to work for goals that don't exist yet is a nation that never succeeds at any goals.
More importantly, the field is at the frontier of exploratory knowledge. We learn new, fantastic stuff every day. Sure, you can't physically go there, but you can learn mind-numbing, unknowable things already. The people who do this are explorers in heart and mind, despite being glued to this magnificent planet.[/QUOTE]
tldr
it's not an excuse anyway
[editline]26th September 2012[/editline]
how can it be an excuse if I never took those subjects in the first place.
Also fuck you, I finished high school and finished it well.
We should throw less money at war and more at space exploration.
since they're looking at the same thing every time, couldn't they just take one image and brighten it? it's late my brain mustn't be working
[QUOTE=mac338;37805930]Yada yada Doppler effect, I'm still surprised by the amount of blueshift in the background.[/QUOTE]
there's no blueshift
[QUOTE=mac338;37805930]Yada yada Doppler effect, I'm still surprised by the amount of blueshift in the background.[/QUOTE]
As far as I know they compensate for the redshift in pictures like these.
[QUOTE=GoDong-DK;37806948]As far as I know they compensate for the redshift in pictures like these.[/QUOTE]
Oh okay, that explains it.
I bet Azathoth is totally shitting his unknowable undergarments right now
I won't mind being a test subject for NASA for a chance to go to space.
Hell, I want them to use me.
Every single point of light is a whole galaxy. With tillions of stars, billions of fantastic solar systems, structures that dwarf even the largest most fantastic nebula in our galaxy.
This is a small part of the image:
[IMG]http://puu.sh/18WAK[/IMG]
[B]Edit:[/B] There, better?
No, that's just noise.
[QUOTE=Nutt007;37807886]Every single point of light is a whole galaxy. With tillions of stars, billions of fantastic solar systems, structures that dwarf even the largest most fantastic nebula in our galaxy.
This is a small part of the image:
[IMG]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/Ia-rMnGCrvMCuFpSO00glA2UIQ3tkqz8FLyvfTbgQWx9Pw6J46iECYZ7zOcn9YqY3_wXBhx_qvA[/IMG][/QUOTE]
thats noise you muppet
I find the actual formation of perfect spiral galaxies that early to be surprising.
This galaxy has two cores:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/2Hv7S.jpg[/img]
[editline]26th September 2012[/editline]
And the bunch underneath look like they're having a 3-way collision.
[editline]26th September 2012[/editline]
It might just be a [i]really really really[/i] bright star in that galaxy, too. It just caught my eye.
I love these images and I can't wait for a more advanced Telescope to reveal larger more detailed images. I mean this is truly amazing and makes me feel so insignificant I might as well be a spec of dust or lonely atom floating through space. But hey, I'm glad I'm not those things and can enjoy the miracle of life!
2deep4u
really though, aren't we getting extremely close to viewing the limits of the universe?
[img]http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17trdeu8qp8m6jpg/medium.jpg[/img]
honestly surprised nobody posted this yet
[QUOTE=Justjake274;37814695]2deep4u
really though, aren't we getting extremely close to viewing the limits of the universe?[/QUOTE]
Well to be fair the 13 billion year old universe could be older than we think. We won't really know until we can see beyond the barriers that are currently set for us. We can only see what has reached us, it is entirely possible that there is much more out there that has yet to touch us with its 13.8+ billion year old light.
[QUOTE=cccritical;37814708][img]http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17trdeu8qp8m6jpg/medium.jpg[/img]
honestly surprised nobody posted this yet[/QUOTE]
why would someone post that
that has literally nothing to do with the new deep field image
If that's an old picture of our universe, how the hell are there NOT tons of galactic civilizations cruising around?
Well I guess if there were we wouldn't know anyway.
[editline]26th September 2012[/editline]
Also, to me, the coolest looking galaxies out there are the deep red colored ones. Badass.
I just can't even wrap my head around any of this.
It blows my fucking mind.
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