[ad_1]
By Tom Metcalfe
Astronomers have created the most detailed picture of our evolving universe. The captivating image, assembled from thousands of photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows more than a quarter of a million galaxies, or about 30 times more galaxies than the previous "deep field" photos.
Dubbed the Hubble Legacy Field, the tiled photo not only offers a detailed overview of a small parcel of sky in the constellation of Fornax, but also a look at the past.
"The galaxies are scattered over time, 550 million years ago and 13 billion years ago," said Garth Illingworth, astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the team leader who created image, at NBC News MACH an email. "Their light has just arrived on Earth now, after going through space for billions of years."
It is thought that the universe was born from the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.
Illingworth called this new picture – which shows galaxies so weak and so distant that they are 10 billion times too small to be seen by a human eye without help – a "living history book of galaxy development".
Illingworth and his colleagues created the image by combining nearly 7,500 separate exposures of about 265,000 galaxies taken by Hubble over a 16-year period.
The exposures, taken at different wavelengths to highlight particular features of each galaxy, include similar photos taken by Hubble, including the deepest image of the universe, the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) of Hubble of 2012.
Deep field views help astronomers track the expansion of the universe, with galaxies indicating the origin of chemical elements and the conditions that made life possible.
"The entire succession of Hubble's field images clarified, and clearly pointed out, that the universe is not a place, but a process," said Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory at Los Angeles. "The image of Hubble Legacy Field is simply further evidence that the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the best ideas on the planet," he added.
According to NASA, the new image will not be outdated until new space telescopes start operating. The long-awaited successor to Hubble, the much larger James Webb Space Telescope, is expected to be launched in 2021.
Hubble was launched on Earth orbit in 1990. It is expected to only operate for five to ten years, but it has been disappearing for 29 years now and is expected to last for at least five years.
DO YOU WANT MORE STORIES ON SPACE?
SUBSCRIBE TO MACH NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM.
[ad_2]
Source link