Discover the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: Deepest Portrait of the Visible Universe

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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) represents the deepest image of the visible universe, revealing approximately 10,000 galaxies formed around 800 million years after the Big Bang. This image covers a minuscule area of the sky, about 1/13 millionth, equivalent to a grain of sand held at arm's length. The exposure time for HUDF was approximately 11 days, allowing astronomers to capture faint light from distant galaxies. The findings from HUDF are expected to provide insights into the early universe and the formation of galaxies. The discussion also touches on the limitations of observing distant galaxies due to the finite speed of light, emphasizing the historical nature of these observations.
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Hubble Ultra Deep Field!

Very, very, very http://www10.ksc.nasa.gov/mirrors/s.../newsdesk/archive/releases/2004/07/index.html.
Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute today unveiled the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the million-second-long exposure reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called "dark ages," the time shortly after the big bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dark universe. The new image should offer new insights into what types of objects reheated the universe long ago.
 
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Astronomy news on Phys.org
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!
 
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!
 
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.
 
HUDF - a thing of beauty
 
Originally posted by Loren Booda
The Hubble Deep Field had been my favorite wallpaper. Thanks for helping me redesign my space with the HUDF.
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.
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?
http://www10.ksc.nasa.gov/mirrors/s...desk/archive/releases/2004/07/text/index.html

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 received roughly 1 photon per minute from the more
distant objects in HUDF.
-The total exposure length was roughly 11 days.
 
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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!
 
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The weird thing is how many of those galaxies were just then generating life!
 
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!
 
  • #10
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.
 
  • #11
Is there anyway that scientists can discover new galaxies without having to wait billions of years for the light?
 
  • #12
Originally posted by 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?
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).
 
  • #13
Originally posted by Dagenais
Is there anyway that scientists can discover new galaxies without having to wait billions of years for the light?
Sure, if the 'new galaxies' are closer than billions of light years from us :wink:

Otherwise, no; nothing travels faster than light (neutrinos are possibly a tiny, tiny fraction slower; gravity is the same as light).
 
  • #14
Otherwise, no; nothing travels faster than light

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



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.
 
  • #15
Maybe branes will enable interdimensional travel. Therein gravity is supposed to bypass ordinary spacetime separation.
 
  • #16
Originally posted by Dagenais
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.
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.
 
  • #17
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?
 
  • #18
Originally posted by Dagenais 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.
'Twas ever thus in astronomy Dagenais, whether the Crab Nebula, a supernova recorded by Chinese, Korean (and more) folk nearly 1,000 years ago, but which exploded some 6,500 years earlier; or SN1987 in the Larger Magellenic Cloud (which many PF members probably saw with their own eyes in 1987), but which exploded some ~165,000 years earlier; or http://skyandtelescope.com/news/current/article_914_1.asp, one of the brightest and nearest gamma ray bursts observed to date, on 29 March 2003 (and Finnish amateur astonomers' observations of which contributed to confirming the GRB-supernova connection), but which originated over 2 billion years ago.

Because the speed of light is finite, we have a time machine.
 
  • #19
The black body radiation is an artifact of the epoch of decoupling (~400,000 years), when hydrogen became largely un-ionized. This hydrogen condensed to form stars (~80,000,000 years), which in turn formed galaxies (<1,000,000,000 years).

Condensation of hydrogen takes place where the Jeans radius, limited by the mean free path of sound in the medium under gravity and at a given temperature, determines the expanse of gaseous agglomeration.
 
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  • #20
If this view touches the very edge of the "Dark Ages", when recombination made electrons join up with nuclei, is there light (EM radiation) to be expected at an earlier time than this? Are there only neutrino and gravitational radiation to be expected from before this time?
 
  • #21
Originally posted by 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?
This is an excellent question wisp!

AFAIK, in the 'concordance model', galaxies condensed from over-(matter*) density fluctuations, which were generated by "inflation, in which quantum fluctuations are able to seed density fluctuations" (the quote is from this lecture, which PF members - esp marcus! - may find interesting).

*'matter' means both 'dark matter' and 'baryonic matter' (the stuff of which we, the Earth, gas, dust, stars, ... are made). In terms of the formation of proto-galaxies, the critical distinction between 'dark matter' and baryonic matter is that the latter can 'cool' as it collapses - when baryonic matter interacts with other baryonic matter, radiation is often generated (so, crudely speaking, gravitational potential energy can be 'lost' as radiation) - this does not happen with 'dark matter'.
 
  • #22
Originally posted by Loren Booda
*SNIP

Condensation of hydrogen takes place where the Jeans radius, limited by the mean free path of sound in the medium under gravity and at a given temperature, determines the expanse of gaseous agglomeration.
I'm sure many PF members and guests don't really understand this statement - would you mind explaining it in somewhat simpler terms Loren?
 
  • #23
In a material medium like gas, the speed of sound determines the extent to which heat is transmitted. Also, large clouds of gas maintain their integrity by self-gravitation.

By considering both - an excess of gravitational energy over thermal energy - one may determine the minimal initial radius of coherent star formation, the Jeans radius.
 
  • #24
Originally posted by 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?

You may want to review this recent paper:http://uk.arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0403/0403225.pdf
 
  • #25
Because the speed of light is finite, we have a time machine.

Half of that stuff might not even exist anymore.

We have to wait for the light to reach us in order to make new discoveries. That's disappointing. Time limits discoveries made.
 
  • #26
Originally posted by Dagenais
Half of that stuff might not even exist anymore.

We have to wait for the light to reach us in order to make new discoveries. That's disappointing. Time limits discoveries made.

But like I said earlier, with in excess of 100 billion such discoveries available to be made, we're not going to run out any time soon.
 
  • #27
It is the faint ghostly stuff that is supposed to be primordially old in this picture, yes? The brighter and more structured objects are foreground objects whose light originates at more recent times. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
  • #29


Originally posted by Monique
?that's an eleven and a half day exposure.. how do they do thát?
Simple summary - take lots of images (http://hubble.gsfc.nasa.gov/survey/hubbledev/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2004/07/faq/index.html ) of the same patch of sky, and add them up. In fact, that's really the only way to do it; otherwise cosmic rays would be difficult to remove from the image.
 
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  • #30
Originally posted by quartodeciman
It is the faint ghostly stuff that is supposed to be primordially old in this picture, yes? The brighter and more structured objects are foreground objects whose light originates at more recent times. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
At the 0-th order, correct.

Next level, the 'blue drop-out' objects are likely to be the really distant ones. Distant objects will be redshifted so much that rest-wavelengths blue-ward of the Lyman limit (which are expected to be absorbed by hydrogen gas near the distant object) are in the visible part of the spectrum. In fact, there will surely be some interesting astronomy to be done looking at the faint objects - which look like point sources? which are distant white dwarfs? which are quasars? etc.

Next level, take spectra of the faint objects ...
 
  • #31
Enough analogies, what's the focal area?

With the original Deep Field, I heard that it was like looking through the eye of a needle held at arms length. For the UDF, it's like a grain of sand at arms length or looking through an 8 foot soda straw. That fine, but what portion of the sky is this equivalent to in terms of arc minutes and seconds?

I've got this data for Deep Field at home some place I think, but I can't find this info anyplace for UDF. If anybody knows, I'd sure be happy if you could share! And if you happen to know a weblink with corroborating data, that would be frosting on the cake.

Thanks fellow space junkies
 
  • #32
Have these observed structures modified Hubble's "tuning fork" or other, sequential, classifications of galaxies?
 
  • #33


Originally posted by monadian
With the original Deep Field, I heard that it was like looking through the eye of a needle held at arms length. For the UDF, it's like a grain of sand at arms length or looking through an 8 foot soda straw. That fine, but what portion of the sky is this equivalent to in terms of arc minutes and seconds?

I've got this data for Deep Field at home some place I think, but I can't find this info anyplace for UDF. If anybody knows, I'd sure be happy if you could share! And if you happen to know a weblink with corroborating data, that would be frosting on the cake.

Thanks fellow space junkies
Try the Fast Facts and Q&A on http://hubble.gsfc.nasa.gov/survey/hubbledev/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2004/07/fastfacts/index.html . 3 arc minutes; < 1 ten-millionth of the whole sky; I'll take a (Belgian) chocolate cake please (or a New York cheesecake with Belgian chocolate topping).
 
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  • #34
Isn't Hubble's optical resolution ~.05"?
 
  • #35
Originally posted by Loren Booda
Isn't Hubble's optical resolution ~.05"?
From the link in my previous post:
"9) How sharp is Hubble's resolution in pinpointing far-flung galaxies in the Ultra Deep Field?

Hubble's keen vision (0.085 arc seconds.) *SNIP[/color]"

The UDF ACS image is ~3' (arc minutes) on each side; the NICMOS one ~2.4' square.
 
  • #36
This is slightly off the topic directly of the HUDF, but it concerns a few things with it. 1) Does anyone have a rough idea of just how large the universe was at that epoch?
2)The dark energy acceleration of the universe, do we know if it is constant, or whether da/dt itself is growing larger or smaller as time goes, or if it is constant or zero?
 
  • #37
The redshift, Z=R(t0)/R(t). Z=100 when the galaxies were "touching," and Z=1000 at the epoch of decoupling. I believe R(t0) is present horizon radius, and R(t) the radius in question.

From Cosmology, by Rowan-Robinson, 3rd ed.
 
  • #38
Interesting, thanks.

Any idea about the dark energy question?
 
  • #39
The paper referred to by ranyart is very good and discusses the formation of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that were fully assembled early in the history of the universe.
Their masses were approx 10^9 greater than our sun (i.e. a billion times our sun's mass). The Hubble pictures show that galaxies had formed shortly after the big bang.
So I am convinced that these SMBH monsters were around early on and formed the seeds of galaxies.
But I am not convinced that "dark matter" played a part in their formation.
Why is it that we can see almost to the edge of our universe and yet nobody has ever found, seen, or can tell us what dark matter really is?
I think that this dark matter might just be an effect that results from the SMBHs presence and maybe these massive black holes were fragments blasted out during the big bang.
 
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  • #40
Hubble Infrared Ultra Deep Field clearly reveals deep cosmic background
fractile 3D mesh of H filaments lit by hypernovae: Murray 2006.11.21

#33. Hubble Ultra Deep Field infrared view,
brightness +20, and both red and blue colors increased,
and green reduced, softness set to 3 of 12 levels, 4.07 MB png,
1600X1600 pixels. 4.07 MB png

The colors have been adjusted to reveal a few faint distant red
sources, as well as a background of tiny blue sources, 1-2 pixel size,
which are always on the background of dark tangled Murray mesh.
Click on All Sizes to view the Original.

The number of the myriad minute blue sources varies noticeably,
for instance,from higher south of the bright foreground star,
just left of center at the bottom, to lower towards the lower right.
This indicates that simple surveys can collect much detailed
information. (Use the All Sizes button and select Original.)

The value of this simple approach is evident,
if we take the tiny blue sources to be
the earliest massive hypernovae and GRBs,
markers that highlight the 3D fractile network distribution of mostly H
gas filaments, condensing by gravitational attraction,
as the universe bubble continued its expansion.
It became cool enough at 380,000 years to allow atoms to form within
the former ionized plasma.
Transparency emerged from opacity.
The intense ultraviolet radiation at 3,000 deg K was redshifted and
cooled with the thousand-fold expansion of space-time to
comprise our era's Cosmic Microwave Background at just 2.7 deg K,
ubiquitious, and uniform to a few parts in a hundred thousand.

See for yourself, Observer,
the deep tapestry of our astrophysical history,
hung hugely against the uniform red background
(downshifted cosmic ultraviolet),
the wooly open knit of cooled and condensed H filaments
(darkly silhouetting the background),
lit like Christmas trees with generations of tiny blue sources,
(the downshifted ultraviolet of immense fast-burning, short-lived
hypernovae,
and a few GRBs,
while some twin sources may be the two jet lobes of active galaxies),
with vistas of closer and cooler galaxies,
ranging from red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and white,
from early small clump cluster galaxies to far larger irregular,
spiral, and elliptical galaxies,
and the little kid in our own neighborhood,
the red foreground star with its diffraction spikes
from the Hubble Space Telescope,
just left of center at the bottom.

I used an excellent low cost image processing program,
MGI PhotoSuite 4.0,
to adjust the colors to bring out the (subtle background details:
Touchup feature:
Soften: set at 3 of 12 levels, to slightly smooth out the pixels.
Color Adjustment: Cyan-Red +75, Magenta-Green -100, Yellow-Blue +50,
as empirically this created a pleasing, easy to view image with maximum
detail.
Brightness: increased from 0 to 20, to increase the dark background
details.
Gamma: unchanged at 1.00.#34. HUDF ir 1/4 area in low center,
800X800 pixels. 1.02 MB png

static.flickr.com/52/121113051_12b5e3b85c_o.png#35. HUDF ir 1/16 area in low center,
400X400 pixels. 263 KB png

static.flickr.com/49/121113052_52157a78ca_o.png#36. HUDF ir closer view. 180 KB png about 60 arc-sec wide

static.flickr.com/53/121150408_69845a7c53_o.png#37. HUDF ir closer view, to show levels of background structure:
distant red glow,
dark 3D fractile mesh that obscures the background red glow,
blue sources that light up the dark mesh of condensing H and He gas,
a few much closer red, white, and blue sources.
Click on All Sizes button for closeup.

static.flickr.com/44/121150409_efdb07b94d_o.png
#38. HUDF ir deepest view -- click on All Sizes button.
RTM-1 is the reddish feature that slants down to the lower right from
the center towards the bright galaxy -- not visible are the bright
objects at both ends of RTM-1, which may be a central ir source with
bipolar jets, seen from the side, that end quickly in a pair of big
expanded hot gas regions, very bright in the other HUDF
visible bands of light. See #31.

static.flickr.com/50/121150410_d95548c86f_o.png
# 19 The Millennium Simulation, announced 2005.06.02 by the Virgo
consortium,
used the largest supercomputer in Europe,
at the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory,
for over a month to model the history of the Universe
in a cube over 2 billion light years on a side,
holding 20 million galaxies.

static.flickr.com/13/18135102_07a58fd89d_o.jpg

This image is a closeup of the results at redshift z = 0, showing a 15
MPC/h thick slice, showing the visible light distribution,
which closely follows the mass distribution.
The view is four times wider than in #18,
so that the width of the image is 1628 MLy.
The length of the central large and dense galaxy cluster
is about 60 MLy.

1024 X 768 pixels jpg 0.970950 MB

The distance measure Mpc/h has been used for decades to adjust to the
fact that the Hubble constant = H has not been exactly determined.
Mpc is megaparsecs.
A parsec is 3.26 light years.
The Millennium Simulation used the value 0.73
for the Hubble constant H.

To get the distance in Mpc,
we multiply their value by 100/H = 100/0.73 = 1.37 .

The huge, densely packed galaxy cluster,
holding thousands of galaxies,
for the greenish central region, has a length of about 60 MLy.
In contrast, the nearest large neighbor to our Milky Way galaxy is
Andromeda galaxy at 2.2 MLy distance.

The distribution of mass in the Universe is very fractile --
it looks just as complex and very much the same
at a very wide range of distance scales.

So, even though I do not know how wide this image would be in terms of
angular measures (degrees, minutes, seconds),
it is probably justified to compare it to the Capodimonte Deep Field
subtle background visible light images.

Many features are the same:
complex 3D fractile network,
with bright boundaries around both brighter (more dense) and dimmer
(more empty) regions,
and both brighter and thicker and thinner and dimmer lines,
marked by myriad tiny dense features.
I don't believe that the MS image includes gravitational lensing, which
must be a complex factor in the CDF images.

Click on All Sizes to view Original.

www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/millennium_sim.asp[/URL] The Virgo consortium

[url]www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/millennium/[/url]

[url]www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/millennium/galseq_D_063.jpg[/url]

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0504097
Simulating the joint evolution of quasars, galaxies and their
large-scale distribution

pil.phys.uniroma1.it/debate3.html
On the fractile structure of the universe
Sylos Labini, Montuori & Pietronero#24 (#30) field from Hubble Ultra Deep Field 832 X 833 p tif 2.72 MB
png 1.86 MB
This field is 61 sec wide = 1 minute wide.
RTM-1 is a pair of double blue spots just above the large magenta
galaxy in the lower left.
There are six more similar blue spot pairs in this field.

static.flickr.com/13/19717874_18d6b931b4_o.png

RTM-1, closeup view in #21, is very like CSL-1,
only blue and more separated,
but with the similar equality of size and color.
It turns out that there are so many easily found pairs of all sizes,
down to single pixel bright spots separated by a pixel space,
that statistical studies are appropriate.
Views # 20 to 29 will explore the HUDF, and provide many helpful links.

The colors have been adjusted to reveal a few faint distant red
sources, as well as a background of tiny blue sources, 1-2 pixel size,
which are always on the background of dark tangled Murray mesh --
easier to see at first behind the red light scattered inside the Hubble
Space Telescope by the much nearer bright star, and also behind the
large blue white galaxy in the upper right. Click on All Sizes to view
the Original.

I used an excellent low cost image processing program, MGI PhotoSuite
4.0, to adjust the colors to bring out the subtle background details:
Touchup feature:
Soften: reduced from 3 to 0, as I wanted to maximize the raw detail.
Color Adjustment: Cyan-Red +100, Magenta-Green +25, Yellow-Blue +50,
as empirically this created a pleasing, easy to view image with maximum
detail.
Brightness: increased from 0 to 50, to increase the dark background
details.
Gamma: reduced from 1.00 to 0.80, to increase the dark background
details.
Fix Colors: Hue: shifted 0 to -60,
to accentuate the background of myriad minute bright blue sources
without losing information from the red end of the spectrum.
 
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