Upgraded with new instruments after May’s servicing mission, the Hubble Space Telescope is starting to crank out a feast of space images in its final stint of observations up to 2014. Now, astronomers have pointed it towards a site of former glory: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field – a region of space that over 2003-4 produced perhaps the telescope’s most famous image: a million-second exposure capturing 10,000 galaxies in one of the longest stares back at the beginning of time.
The new images of the area look, to the untutored eye, much like the old ones. But they’re taken with the Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed in the last servicing mission, and is particularly sensitive to infrared light. (The earlier snaps were visible light images).
“The expansion of the Universe causes the light from very distant galaxies to appear redder, so having a new camera on Hubble which is very sensitive in the infrared means we can identify galaxies at much greater distances than was previously possible,” explains Stephen Wilkins, a postdoc in astrophysics at Oxford University, UK (press release).
That means the new observations contain “perhaps the most distant galaxies yet seen,” Oxford astronomer Andrew Bunker tells the BBC – though he says the exact distance is yet to be confirmed. The Telegraph, apparently following a NASA release, says the galaxies are around 13 billion light years away, and were formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang.
“These new observations are likely to be the most sensitive images Hubble will ever take, but the very distant galaxies we have now discovered will be studied in detail by Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be launched in 2014,” notes Jim Dunlop, of the University of Edinburgh (press release). For more detail on the James Webb telescope, see Nature’s feature, New Eyes, New Skies – subscription required.
Full results are included in three separate papers to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (links point to ArXiv, where they’ve been posted)
Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and the University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (UCO/Lick Observatory and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team