The Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[haggholm]

Wikipedia tells us (with my ellipses and emphases):

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, or HUDF, is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003 through January 16, 2004. […] The HUDF contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. The patch of sky in which the galaxies reside (just one-tenth the diameter of the full moon as viewed from Earth) was chosen because it had a low density of bright stars in the near-field. Although most of the targets visible in the Hubble image can also be seen at infrared wavelengths by ground-based telescopes, Hubble is the only instrument which can make observations of these distant targets at visible wavelengths. Located southwest of Orion in the Southern-Hemisphere constellation Fornax at right ascension 3h 32m 40.0s, declination -27° 47' 29" (J2000), the image covers 36.7 square arcminutes. This is smaller than a 1 mm by 1 mm square of paper held 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky.

Here is a high-resolution JPEG image. (It's 6200x6200 pixels and 19.23 MiB, so be aware.) I downloaded it, scaled it down, and used a horizontal slice as a wallpaper for my 2960x1050 (dual screen) desktop…

Now, the reason it's called the Ultra Deep Field is that it's a deep image—that is, it's a picture of galaxies that are really, really far away—about thirteen billion light-years away. Of course this is a mind-boggling distance, but if you think about it for just a moment, something even more amazing becomes obvious: If it's thirteen billion light-years away, then it took thirteen billion years for the light of those galaxies to reach us—so the picture isn't really of those galaxies now, but rather that region of the universe as it looked thirteen billion years ago. To put that number into some perspective, the universe is estimated to be about 13.8 billion years old (last I heard)—this is within a billion years of that. I'm twenty-six years old; in relative terms, that picture is to the universe as a picture of my eighteen-month-old toddler self is to me.

That huge picture is a look, a direct, physical image, of the infancy of our universe.

Comments

[kokopellinelli]

That is so incredible. All those galaxies, so close to each other (well, relatively, I guess). Beautiful picture.