Hubble Goes Deep, Finds Farthest Galaxies Yet

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By Ron Cowen, Science News

Just days after NASA released the first cosmic dreamscapes taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope three teams of astronomers have used the rejuvenated observatory to find what appears to be a bounty of the most distant galaxies known.

Analyses of infrared images of these galaxies captured in late August and early September with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 suggest there were fewer bright galaxies early in cosmic history and those galaxies formed stars at an unexpectedly low rate.

Because the researchers do not yet have measurements of the wavelengths that make up the starlight from these galaxies, they do not directly know how far away the galaxies lie. But the starlit bodies’ colors suggest that about 16 reside roughly 12.9 billion light-years from Earth and another five or so sit even further, a record-breaking 13.1 billion light-years away.

“We are looking back 13 billion years and seeing galaxies just 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was like a 4-year-old,” says Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of one of the discovery teams.


The galaxies all lie within a small patch of the southern sky, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, that has already been imaged by Hubble and a slew of other telescopes.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/hubbledeepfield/