NASA releases Hubble's farthest-ever view of the universe

[pokerfan]

(Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team)

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.

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.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/xdf.html

[geckosfeet]

1. My God. Our universe is effectively endless.

And here we sit. Squabbling over petroleum.

[silverweb]

5. + 1000.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]My thought exactly.

[zbdent]

2. Is that ... can it be?

Romney's credibility ... wayyyyy off in the distance ...

[PuppyBismark]

3. And it was all created in the last 6,000 years. N/T

[NYC_SKP]

4. Beautiful, though these images are typically colored using "artistic license", not representative.

not representative of actual colors, or even of the visible light spectrum.

They are, nonetheless, awe inspiring!

K/R

[Posteritatis]

7. At that range they're likely running into the edges of the visible spectrum due to redshift. (nt)

[pokerfan]

9. Yeah, it's actually near infrared

The James Webb Space Telescope's infrared vision will be able to see even further, closer to the big bang.

[Odin2005]

6. WOWWWWWWWWWW!!!

[CrispyQ]

8. ...

I Hubble!




on edit: It looks like a giant insect.

[littlemissmartypants]

10. WOW pokerfan

this post is out of this world!!!

[pokerfan]

11. To put it in perspective

Some back of the envelope calculations: The image is 2.3 by 2 arcminutes in size (a complete sphere is approximately 148,510,660 square arcminutes) so we would need more than thirty million of these images to cover the sky. A single arcminute is approximately one inch at 100 yards so figure the XDF is equivalent to a postage stamp (about an inch on a side) at fifty yards more or less.