Space Topics: Hubble Space Telescope
The Year in Pictures: 2009
Incomprehensible Numbers of Galaxies of Inconceivable Age Unimaginably
Far Away
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field from WFC3
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
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The Hubble Space Telescope last looked at this region
of space in 2004 with its Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Now, in 2009,
the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 has imaged the "Hubble Ultra
Deep Field" again. It is a region of space that lacks any bright stars
(the brightest appears in the lower right, with crosshairs); consequently,
Hubble could stare at the same region of space for a total of two full days
of light-gathering time without "washing out" the image with light
from bright, nearby stars. The result is a window onto unimaginably ancient
and distant objects. Nearly ever spot on this image is a galaxy. The most
distant ones are the reddest, whose visible light output is Doppler shifted
deep into the infrared. This image is composed of three frames taken in near-infrared
wavelengths of 1.6, 1.25, and 1.05 microns. The image appears blurrier than
the previous Hubble Ultra Deep Field image because of the long wavelength
(for reasons explained more fully by Ethan Siegel in this
blog post).
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