Sitting at the edge of the universe

Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illing­worth (UCO/Lick Obser­va­tory and the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (UCO/Lick Obser­va­tory and Lei­den Uni­ver­sity), and the HUDF09 Team

Just imag­ine count­less ancient galax­ies sit­ting at the edge of the universe.

I just had to put up a zoom of this stun­ning image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. This is the deep­est view ever of the uni­verse taken in near-infrared light. The faintest and red­dest objects in this image were formed only 600 mil­lion years after the Big Bang. This makes them incred­i­bly old; close to 13 bil­lion years old. What is the coolest thing about this image is that astronomers have never seen galax­ies of this age before. The image con­tains count­less galax­ies and this is only from a tiny part of the sky.

A team of astronomers had the Hub­ble Space Telescope’s new Wide Field Cam­era 3 (WFC3) stare at this spot in the sky for four days.