![]() The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before," said Illingworth, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2009 (HUDF09) program. "The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. More than 2,000 images of the same field were taken with Hubble's two premier cameras: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3, which extends Hubble's vision into near-infrared light. Hubble pointed at a tiny patch of southern sky in repeat visits (made over the past decade) for a total of 50 days, with a total exposure time of 2 million seconds. The history of galaxies-from soon after the first galaxies were born to the great galaxies of today, like our Milky Way-is laid out in this one remarkable image. Peppered across the field are tiny, faint, more-distant galaxies that are like the seedlings from which today's magnificent galaxies grew. These red galaxies are the remnants of dramatic collisions between galaxies and are in their declining years. Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do large, fuzzy red galaxies where the formation of new stars has ceased. ![]() The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 20. The size of the XDF on the sky is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon. The image combines 10 years of Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe.Ĭalled the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by a team led by Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
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