The Hubble Telescope Shows Galaxies 13.2 Billion Years Old

The universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old, and a recent composite of images taken on NASA's Hubble Telescope show 13.2 billion of those. Earth years, that is. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon.

The full-color XDF image is extremely sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. 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. 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.




The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars extraordinarily brighter than our sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a "time tunnel into the distant past." The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the universe's birth in the big bang.


 

Pretty sweet right? I saw this on CBS news this morning and thought it was pretty spectacular.

[Via CBS Morning News via NASA]

Jaron Schneider's picture

Jaron Schneider is an Fstoppers Contributor and an internationally published writer and cinematographer from San Francisco, California. His clients include Maurice Lacroix, HD Supply, SmugMug, the USAF Thunderbirds and a host of industry professionals.

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4 Comments

This deserves less than zero replies. 

I love this image, and all other deep field images, but I wish there was a way you should simulate the scale. With a parallax of some kind. I doubt it's possible, but it would be cool if you could get some comprehension of the depth. 

Not complaining, though, image is incredible. 

Wouldn't the NASA need 2 camera in space? At the price of 1... 

Well, to do it with two cameras would require that they be thousands of light years apart in order to simulate depth on a universal level. 

Just a wish of mine, really. I know it's not possible.

Sorry, I put less than zero replies, but meant MORE than zero. Shame this kind of work doesn't get more views.