NASA's Hubble gazes 13.2 billion years into universe's past
Summary: NASA has released the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest-ever shot of the universe, composed of 10 years of photos from the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA has published the deepest-ever view of the universe, stitching together multiple images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) focuses on a small patch of the constellation Fornax, containing some 5,500 galaxies. The image was culled from 10 years of photos of the same region of space shown in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which was last updated in 2009, based on data gathered in 2003 and 2004.
The XDF offers an even deeper view than the Ultra Deep Field, revealing galaxies of multiple colours and shapes, as well as burnt-out red galaxies where stars are no longer formed.
"The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen," said Garth Illingworth, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2009 programme, in a statement on Tuesday. "XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before."
In fact, the galaxies in the image date back 13.2 billion years into the universe's 13.7 billion-year lifespan.
The Hubble Telescope, which launched in 1990, is expected to continue functioning until 2014. The successor to the Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch in 2018 and is designed to look even further into the XDF, seeking to capture galaxies that existed when the universe was just a few hundred million years old.
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Talkback
Not too shabby for a device...
13.2 billion years ago?
so i ask how can anyone believe 13.2 billion years ago?
on the off chance that this could be done what is the reference point?
today? today was along time in the future 13.2 billion years ago.
smoke and mirrors will fool most everybody all the time.
13.2 billion years
You are kidding yourself
Response to Curtis Crab
Like SamBo4, I advise no one to listen to this anonymous and misleading muck; even though a reputable website has allowed your excreta to be put up.
The Hubble is an amazing piece of technology that is way ahead of it's time and has accomplished more than expected since it began work. It has even astounded those people at NASA and JPL who built it !
Response to curtisdacrab
Curt - you can absolutley "look into the past". Light takes time to travel across distance, and its a considerable distance to different galaxies. Heard of a lightyear? (per wikipedia, 1 light-year = 9460730472580800 metres (exactly) These pictures are of places that are 13.2 billion light years away, therefore what we see today is from 13.2 billion years ago.
Not quite smoke in mirrors...
Actually, you would be wrong too...
By universal constant time, I'm referring to a constant, which would require that the universe be seen as one entity in the framework of a single god-like entity who could see all as one, universally, and not dependent on the definition of time being dependent on the speed of light.
If one were to look at a wave on an ocean, and one were to follow that wave across the ocean, one could define time as, how far that wave took to travel from point A to point B. But, if one were to look at the whole ocean from the distance of space, the movement of the wave would be immaterial to the bigger image that one could get from that distant position of space.
Imagine then that, there were to be a different universe next to ours, where an intelligent life form had a complete view of our universe as a single blob. That intelligent life form would not be thinking about our universe in terms of how big it is in terms of the speed of light. It would be a single unit to that entity in the other universe, and the speed of light would be irrelevant. The view to that entity would be of a single blob, with space and time becoming irrelevant. But, for sure, that life form would notice that, our blob was expanding. If that entity could look at the edges of our universe, and take a look at us within that universe, he would be looking at the whole thing within a constant single instance, and measurements using time frames and/or distances, would not even enter into any "mental or scientific" calculations for that other universe's life-form.
It's all relative, including the speed of light, and time, and universal constants.
the speed of light
They measure the light's intensity, frequency, and relative position (parallax) to determine how old it is. Light is subject to the doppler effect just like sound is, so we can see how long light has traveled by studying how much it is red or blue shifted.
If you want to go back even further, look up the microwave background radiation from the beginning of the Universe.
Smoke and mirrors? Nope, you're just clueless.
rguitar87 explains some basics to Dr. Crab
parallax is useless
As far as more distant objects than our own Galaxy are concerned, you rely on standard candles of all kinds, color (yes, frequency as you pointed out) with the Hubble(Lemaître) Law and correlations of all these methods.
RE: 13.2 billion years ago?
Measurements by the WMAP satellite can help resolve this crisis. If current ideas about the origin of large-scale structure are correct, then the detailed structure of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations will depend on the current density of the universe, the composition of the universe and its expansion rate. WMAP has been able to determine these parameters with an accuracy of better than than 3% of the critical density. In turn, knowing the composition with this precision, we can estimate the age of the universe to about 1%: 13.7 ± 0.13 billion years!
How does WMAP data enable us to determine the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, with an uncertainty of 1%? The key to this is that by knowing the composition of matter and energy density in the universe, we can use Einstein's General Relativity to compute how fast the universe has been expanding in the past. With that information, we can turn the clock back and determine when the universe had "zero" size, according to Einstein. The time between then and now is the age of the universe.
No Bibles, or no schoolbooks?
And then, from "zero size", or nothing, came everything...
What we don't understand, we can't dispute, or come to any kind of certainty about.
No, things are not as simple as science would have us believe, nor as simple as the bible and religions would have us believe.
The truth is out there, and still, beyond our little minds to comprehend.
Troll
Troll: one who may disagree with my position or beliefs...
No scientist or researcher can, as far as can be determined currently, tell us that, we got an entire immense universe of matter and energy and rules (including he math that explains the behavior of everything) and shapes and an unending variety of objects, including life-forms, out of, NOTHING!!!!
Good grief does
It's all reflections
For absolutely crying out loud, ZDNet
Mr. Baggins....
You misunderstand. ZDNet was