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Astronomers released Thursday a new remarkable image of the deep universe. The image, fully displayed at the end of this article, contains perhaps 265,000 visible galaxies crammed into a region smaller than the apparent size of the moon in the sky.
The photo is composed of 7,500 photos taken in 16 years by the Hubble Space Telescope, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency. If Hubble took the images in a consecutive observation, it would last 250 days.
"No image will surpass this one before launching future space telescopes like James Webb," said Garth Illingworth, astronomer of the University of California at Santa Cruz, in a press release.
The new image is part of an ongoing project called Hubble Legacy Field. The idea is to focus year after year the limited power of Hubble resolution on a small part of the night sky and create the deepest and most complete image of space. This small survey is then applied to the larger universe, which allows astronomers to better understand it, both in space and in time.
The project began in 1995 when the telescope captured its first and famous Hubble Deep Field image. For this photo, Hubble targeted one of the darkest areas of the night sky and observed it for 10 days, taking over 340 photos of the place. Scientists have combined the images into an image revealing the brilliance of hundreds of unpublished galaxies, broadening our understanding of the scale and history of the universe.
Since then, astronauts have traveled to Hubble several times to repair, upgrade cameras and install new equipment, enhancing the far-field observatory's vision.
Astronomers have exploited these improvements to improve not only the original image of the "deep field", but also to create a vision of the space that surrounds it.
"Now that we are larger than previous surveys, we are exploiting far more distant galaxies in the largest dataset ever produced," said Illingworth.
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The colors of the photo extend just beyond the limits of human vision – from ultraviolet to near infrared light – and contain galaxies 10 billion times weaker than our eyes could detect.
This actually offers a deeper view of the past than ever before: a glimpse of galaxies as they existed 13.3 billion years ago. That's how long it took their light to reach Hubble's sensors, and represents a period of about 500 million years after the birth of the universe.
Before Hubble, the best telescopes could only see light from objects about 7 billion light years away.
Zoom on more than 200,000 galaxies viewed by Hubble
You will find below the Hubble image in real size that you can explore.
Printed at a photo quality resolution, it would reach 2.16 meters tall.
Drag the photo to pan and magnify any part of the image using the +/- buttons, pinching and zooming on a mobile phone, or using a scroll wheel. scrolling on a desktop.
"Hubble has spent more time on this small area than in any other area of the sky," said a website on the telescope.
Researchers will continue to add and enhance the image with new Hubble observations as long as the telescope is operational. (When Hubble stops, NASA might try to plunge her into a "spaceship graveyard" in the Pacific Ocean.)
But once the powerful James Webb Space Telescope is launched and new ground observatories are opened, our vision of this night sky and our knowledge of the most remote spaces of space and time s & # 39; improve.
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