Hubble Snaps Universe's Oldest Galaxies: BIG PIC
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Dec. 9, 2009 -- The Hubble Space Telescope has captured some of the universe's oldest galaxies using a new infrared camera, and may reveal the first galaxies from the "dark ages" shortly after the Big Bang, scientists announced Tuesday.
The Wide Field Camera 3, newly installed on the telescope by NASA astronauts earlier this year, has snapped galaxies "which are likely to be the most distant ever seen," said scientists who studied the images.
The highly sensitive camera uses infrared light, invisible to the human eye, to detect starlight from distant objects -- light that has been "stretched" by the expanding universe.
The images were taken in a region of space called the Ultra Deep Field, which Hubble first captured five years ago and is estimated to hold over 10,000 galaxies.
"Hubble has now revisited the Ultra Deep Field which we first studied five years ago, taking infrared images which are more sensitive than anything obtained before," said Daniel Stark, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge who was involved in the work.
"We can now look even further back in time, identifying galaxies when the universe was only 5 percent of its current age -- within one billion years of the Big Bang," he said on the Royal Astronomical Society Web site.
NASA spacewalking astronauts installed the new camera in May as part of a mission to upgrade and repair the 19-year-old telescope.
For an even deeper look into Hubble's latest galaxy findings, read Discovery News' Ray Villard's take HERE.
Source: NASA/AFP
Image credit: NASA/ESA/S. Beckwith(STScI) and The HUDF Team.
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