Hubble Ultra Deep Field!!

russ_watters

Very, very, very COOL.

Loren Booda

The Hubble Deep Field had been my favorite wallpaper. Thanks for helping me redesign my space with the HUDF. There's art, and apparently intelligence, as far as one can see!

hedons

Supposedly the now famous original Hubble Deep Field covered an area of sky equivalent to the size of a grain of sand held at arms distance. How small an area does this new Ultra Deep Field photo cover?

Thanks!

Daaf

I recently saw a documentary on Discovery covering the Hubble telescope. At the very end of the program they said something about the next-generation Hubble, which (if they get the thing up somehow... $-wise) will be positioned 1 000 000 kms from earth.
Sounds good! They want to look at the universe at an even earlier stage. Pictures like the one posted above make us feel good about such projects again.

Phobos

HUDF - a thing of beauty

russ_watters

I'm alrady planning the poster/collage I'm going to make of it. I'll take a large photo of the whole thing for the center and two small blowups of individual galaxies or portions of it to each side/top/bottom. Press Release

Some numbers:

-HUDF covers a field of about 1/10 the diameter of the Moon, or
roughly 1/13millionth of the sky.
-HUDF contains about 10,000 galaxies.
-The oldest objects in HUDF formed roughly 800 million
years after the Big Bang.
-Hubble recieved roughly 1 photon per minute from the more
distant objects in HUDF.
-The total exposure length was roughly 11 days.

ranyart

Amazing! and if one looks close, actually if one moves away from the full image to about 6ft, one can clearly see an 'S'(rotation to the left of 12:00 clock), barred shape collection of Galaxies, almost as if flying outwards from a catherine wheel firework!

Pretty awesome field!

Loren Booda

The weird thing is how many of those galaxies were just then generating life!

Embermage

Just a quick clarification: the picture shows what the universe may have looked like billions of years ago because of the speed of light and the distance it has to travel to get to the hubble camera? So in essence, the other galaxies may be more developed now, but they don't appear so to us yet... sound right?

Thanks!

Nereid

From the press release: "The ACS uncovered galaxies that existed 800 million years after the big bang (at a redshift of 7). But the NICMOS may have spotted galaxies that lived just 400 million years after the birth of the cosmos (at a redshift of 12). Thompson must confirm the NICMOS discovery with follow-up research."

Here is an example of how this kind of follow-up has been done using large Earth-based telescopes. While the objects that Gemini looked at are not in the UDF (they're very close near by), and as the faint galaxies have already been located (on NICMOS images) the 'search' part of the GEMINI work is already done, the spectra will likely be obtained in a manner similar to that described in the link.

Dagenais

Is there anyway that scientists can discover new galaxies without having to wait billions of years for the light?

Nereid

Not quite.

a) the distant galaxies are much redder in the image than they would have looked if you had been there at the time

b) the image contains objects at distances from 'next door' (e.g. stars in our own Milky Way), through 'sort of close' (e.g. galaxies 'only' ~1 billion light years distant), to extremely distant galaxies. In the early days of the universe, if you were there, you'd also see nearby stars and quite a few nearby 'galaxies' (they'd look quite different), but no distant ones.

You are right in saying that we're seeing the galaxies as they were when the light we now record left the galaxies, ~ 1 billion to ~<13 billion years ago. IF we could 'see' them 'today', they'd look different (the 'nearby' ones would look similar to how they appear in the image; the distant ones, likely very different).

Nereid

Sure, if the 'new galaxies' are closer than billions of light years from us [;)]

Otherwise, no; nothing travels faster than light (neutrinos are possibly a tiny, tiny fraction slower; gravity is the same as light).

Dagenais

Says you. Ever heard of the Millennium Falcon? It's called hyper speed!

[t)] [:D]

That sucks though. Having to wait for new discoveries, as opposed to sciences like Computers, where you don't have to wait a certain amount of time for new, important discoveries.

Loren Booda

Maybe branes will enable interdimensional travel. Therein gravity is supposed to bypass ordinary spacetime separation.

russ_watters

With 10,000 galaxies in that photo alone (remember, not all of them are 13 billion light years away - many are much closer), waiting for the light to get here is not a concern.

wisp

So how did all these galaxies form so quickly after the Big Bang?
Did the galaxies condense from BB material or was something thrown out during the BB that formed the seeds of the galaxies?