Physics
Today: NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope
has made the deepest image of the universe ever taken in
near-IR light.
Image credit: NASAThe 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-IR
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.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. IR 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-IR
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.
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Image credit: NASA