Astronomers draw the most detailed picture of the universe so far



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"The space is big. Really big. You can not believe how huge, huge, bewildering it is. I mean, you may think that the chemist is a long way to go, but it's just peanut to space. "- Douglas Adams, The Galactic Traveler's Guide

Hubble's astronomers have assembled the largest and most complete image of the universe ever recorded, assembling the data collected by several telescopes over the years of observation.

In 1995, astronomers created the first attempt at imaging the deep universe by "watching" Hubble on an empty sky area for a million seconds. The resulting image, Hubble's deep field, has become one of the most popular spatial photographs ever taken. This is the characteristic image of this article. But the HDF was an extremely small photo. It's focused on about a 24 millionth of the sky. Subsequent surveys, including Deep Origins Deep Survey, Hubble Ultra-Deep Field and eXtreme Deep Field, built on this initial imagery with additional telescopes, or further examining another area of ​​the sky (the original HDF imagined an area space in Ursa Major, while the UDF and XDF functions both focused on a space area of ​​the Fornax constellation). New cameras added to the Hubble after 1995 have also been used in some of these surveys.

Astronomers have created this last image, nicknamed the Hubble Legacy Field, by combining the data used in the previous surveys of the sky. Here is HubbleSite.org:

Now, astronomers are releasing a new deep field image by combining the exposures of many of these earlier "galaxy fishing expeditions". Their efforts have resulted in the largest and most complete "history book" of galaxies in the universe. The snapshot, a combination of nearly 7,500 distinct Hubble exhibits, represents 16 years of observations. This ambitious enterprise is called Hubble Legacy Field. The new view contains about 30 times more galaxies than in the HUDF. The range of wavelengths extends from ultraviolet to near infrared light, capturing all the characteristics of assembling galaxies over time.

The image mosaic presents a broad portrait of the distant universe and contains about 265,000 galaxies. They extend over 13.3 billion years, barely 500 million years after the birth of the universe in the Big Bang.

And here, without further ado, the aforementioned Hubble Legacy Field:

Hubble-Legacy-Field

Hubble Legacy Field. Click to enlarge.

The same view zoomed out, via video:

This image contains a history of galactic formation, from the childhood of early galaxies entirely composed of metal-poor stars to more recent star systems and galaxies (large galaxies are generally closer to us, and therefore closer in physical distance). and the time).

"Such exquisite high-resolution measurements of the many galaxies in this catalog allow for many extragalactic studies," said lead catalog researcher Katherine Whitaker of the University of Connecticut in Storrs. "Often, this type of investigation has led to unexpected discoveries that have had the greatest impact on our understanding of galaxy evolution." Previously, the unique images that make up the Hubble Legacy Field were not assembled from consistent way, making them easier for users. researchers to use.

This image should be the largest and highest available resolution of distant galaxies until new generation telescopes like the James Webb are online and available. The same team that built this image is now working on building other similar mosaics, hoping to expand their work to include captured data in non-visible spectra, such as infrared X-ray observations and high energy.

Background image by Wikipedia

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