The Deep Field
Credit & Copyright:
R. Williams,
The HDF
Team
(STScI),
NASA,
Explanation:
Galaxies like
colorful pieces of candy fill the
Hubble Deep Field -
humanity's most distant yet
optical view of the Universe.
The dimmest, some as faint as 30th magnitude
(about four billion times fainter than stars visible to the unaided eye),
are
the most distant galaxies and represent
what
the
Universe looked like in the
extreme past, perhaps less than one billion years after the
Big Bang.
To make the Deep Field image, astronomers
selected an uncluttered area of the sky in the
constellation Ursa Major (the Big Bear) and
pointed the
Hubble Space Telescope
at a single spot for 10 days accumulating and combining
many separate exposures. With each additional exposure, fainter
objects were revealed.
The final result can be used to explore the
mysteries of galaxy evolution and
the infant Universe.
Authors & editors:
Robert Nemiroff
(MTU) &
Jerry Bonnell
(USRA)
NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings,
and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris.
Specific
rights apply.
A service of:
LHEA at
NASA /
GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
