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Astronomers have assembled a mosaic of nearly 7,500 images taken from the distant universe, creating the largest and most complete "history book" of galaxies ever made.
The mosaic, called Hubble Legacy Field, combines observations from 16 years of Deep Field Surveys of the Hubble Space Telescope, including the Extreme Deep Field survey, which offers the widest vision of the universe, according to a NASA statement.
"Now that we are wider than in previous surveys, we are exploiting far more distant galaxies in the largest dataset ever produced by Hubble," Garth Illingworth, team leader who assembled the image and researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says in the statement. "This picture contains the whole story of the growth of galaxies in the universe, from childhood until they became" full grown "."
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It is a part of the Hubble Legacy Field, which includes thousands of images and represents 16 years of Hubble observations. It's one of the widest views of the universe ever made.
(Image: © NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth and D. Magee (University of California at Santa Cruz), K. Whitaker (University of Connecticut), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), P. Oesch (University of Geneva) and the Hubble Legacy Field Team)
The image contains 265,000 galaxies, spanning more than 13.3 billion years of the history of our universe. Some of the galaxies captured in the mosaic date back 500 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was still young and the planets were just beginning to form. Therefore, the new mosaic can be used to better understand the expansion of the universesaid the astronomers.
"Such exquisite high-resolution measurements of the many galaxies in this catalog allow for many extragalactic studies," said Katherine Whitaker, senior catalog researcher and physicist at the University of Connecticut. "Often, this type of survey has resulted in unexpected discoveries that have had the greatest impact on our understanding of the evolution of galaxies."
Capture a wider view
According to NASA's statement, the new mosaic captures about 30 times more galaxies than any previous view on a deep field and covers almost the entire width of the full moon.
The mosaic includes Hubble images ranging from ultraviolet to near infrared light, providing a detailed view of the various characteristics of galaxy assembly over time. This includes the remains of galactic collisions or fusions. This information helps to illustrate the evolution of galaxies over time and to build to become the giant galaxies seen in the near universe, according to another statementthat of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The new mosaic is one of the widest views ever taken of the universe, extending almost the width of the full moon in the earthly sky.
(Image: © Hubble Legacy Field Image: NASA, ESA, and G. Illingworth and D. Magee (University of California at Santa Cruz) Image of the Moon: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center and Arizona State University)
"An interesting aspect of these new images is the large number of sensitive color channels available for viewing distant galaxies, especially in the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum," Rychard Bouwens, one of the team members mosaic of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands said in the Hubble statement. "With images at so many frequencies, we can dissect the light of galaxies by providing the contribution of old and young stars, as well as active galactic nuclei", supermassive black holes releasing radiation in the center of certain galaxies.
Before the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, astronomers were limited to observing galaxies according to the release, at a maximum distance of about 7 billion light years, which shows objects halfway to the Big Bang.
Astronomers have declared that no other image could surpass the new portrait of the universe before the launch of future telescopes and further deepen the field of inheritance. These instruments will include NASA's wide-field infrared surveyor telescope and James Webb Space Telescope.
The new view of the universe is available via the online database Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, which includes Hubble data and other NASA missions.
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