Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Hubble Telescope takes its most distant picture yet

MSD · 12-08-2009, 04:02 PM

HubbleSite - NewsCenter - Hubble's Deepest View of Universe Unveils Never-Before-Seen Galaxies (12/08/2009) - Release Images

Quote:

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed 600 million years after the Big Bang. No galaxies have been seen before at such early times. The new deep view also provides insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the universe's history.

The image was taken in the same region as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), which was taken in 2004 and is the deepest visible-light image of the universe. Hubble's newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) collects light from near-infrared wavelengths and therefore looks even deeper into the universe, because the light from very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe.

This image was taken by the HUDF09 team, which was awarded the time for the observation and made it available for research by astronomers worldwide. In just three months, 12 scientific papers have already been submitted on these new data.

The photo was taken with the new WFC3/IR camera on Hubble in late August 2009 during a total of four days of pointing for 173,000 seconds of total exposure time. Infrared light is invisible and therefore does not have colors that can be perceived by the human eye. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium, and long, near-infrared wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; red, 1.6 microns). The representation is "natural" in that blue objects look blue and red objects look red. The faintest objects are about one-billionth as bright as can be seen with the naked eye.

These Hubble observations are trailblazing a path for Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will look even farther into the universe than Hubble, at infrared wavelengths. The JWST is planned to be launched in 2014.

The HUDF09 team members are Garth Illingworth (University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory and the University of California, Santa Cruz), Rychard Bouwens (University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory and Leiden University), Pascal Oesch and Marcella Carollo (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH)), Marijn Franx (Leiden University), Ivo Labbe (Carnegie Institute of Washington), Daniel Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz), Massimo Stiavelli (Space Telescope Science Institute), Michele Trenti (University of Colorado, Boulder), and Pieter van Dokkum (Yale University).

For additional information, contact:

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-4514
villard@stsci.edu

Garth Illingworth
University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory and
the University of California, Santa Cruz, Calif.
831-459-2843
gdi@ucolick.org

Object Name: HUDF WFC3/IR

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and the University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (UCO/Lick Observatory and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team

It's no secret that the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image is one of my favorite things in the world. I've probably posted it at least 20 times in various contexts on TFP. To see even deeper into the universe than that is astounding, and Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope are just going to reveal more of the universe's secrets to us as time goes on. Every picture the Hubble takes is personally meaningful to me because I look at them and see mind-blowing images taken by a big flying camera that my dad helped to build 20 years ago.

We have a few discussions going on about science right now on TFP, and some people are highly critical of the scientific community. To them, I say "This is it, this is science at its purest." Nobody is going to blow up other people with this research and NASA is never going to turn a profit on these projects. We just want a better understanding our universe. We still don't know what 96% of that universe is.