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The image mosaic was created using 16-year-old data from the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows about 265,000 galaxies dating back 13.3 billion years, barely 500 million years after the Big Bang.
Context: This is not the first Hubble deep field image. The first was published in 1995, with other deep field images followed in 2003, 2004 and 2012. However, it is by far the most complete. It was created by weaving together several of the previous Hubble photos. The image, nicknamed the Hubble Legacy Field, represents 7,500 distinct exhibitions. It contains about 30 times more galaxies than the previous ones. The picture above is only part of the whole: you can see the complete thing here.
A machine to go back in time: Because so many galaxies captured by Hubble are so far away, it took them billions of years to get their light to us. This makes the telescope a kind of time machine, allowing us to see the galaxies as they were billions of years ago.
And then? No image will surpass it before the launch of future space telescopes, according to Garth Illingworth from the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the team that assembled the image. Fortunately, NASA has planned the launch of two new telescopes: the James Webb space telescope in 2021 and the wide-field surveyor telescope in 2025.
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