Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The History of the Universe According to Hubble

Here at the American Astronomical Society meeting in DC today, they unveiled a spectacular new Hubble image. Check this out.

Click to embiggen or go and download the really high res image. For even more fun, check out the zoomable version. This image was produced by a combination of two cameras on Hubble: The Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 (which was just installed earlier this year). Combining the different abilities of the two cameras lets you see more objects that cover a wider range of wavelengths.

This image represents a LOT of Hubble time...over 100 orbits of staring at the same little speck of sky. The payoff is getting this image of over 7500 galaxies dating back to the dawn of the Universe. At this point, we don't even talk distance anymore since the farthest we can see is 13.some billion light years. We have to talk about how much the light was redshifted. Look for the tiniest bits of red...those are the most distant galaxies. In this case, they are literally redshifted.

So much great stuff is happening at this meeting...wish I had more time to see it all and write about it!

Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.

5 comments:

MinnesotaChick said...

Awesome pic!!

Beejay said...

Awesome pix is right...and Hale, I am so excited, I rec'd a gift yesterday...a book called 'Star Maps!' Oh now I can figure out what is what...I hope.

kkdither said...

My kids brought home a very cool book that lit up at night, sort of like those stars you blue tack to the ceiling. You took it outside and matched it up with the sky. Is that the book you are referring to, beejay?

OrbsCorbs said...

Oh my stars!

That whole thing about being able to look back in time is cool.

Beejay said...

I do believe you may be right, kk....cool book.