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These three images
shows galaxies as were more than 10000 milion years ago.
Some of them may have formed less that one billion
years after the Big Bang.
Besides the classical spiral- and elliptical-shaped galaxies, there is a bewildering variety of other galaxy shapes and colors. The never before seen dimmest galaxies are nearly 30th magnitude. The brigthest stars belong to our galaxy. This "true-color" view was assembled from 342 separate images taken in blue, red, and infrared light. |
SAMPLE GALAXIES
FROM THE HUBBLE DEEP FIELD
(R. Williams. 15-1-1996)
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Distant GalaxiesAstronomers analyzing the Hubble Deep Field -- the faintest view of the universe taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope -- may have identified what may prove to be the most distant objects observed to date. Scattered among the nearly 2,000 galaxies in the Hubble images, which were taken last December, researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNY) and collaborators (Alberto Fernandez-Soto, of the university of Cantabria) find several dozen galaxies they believe exhibit characteristics which make them appear to be more distant than any seen previously. Six of the galaxies appear to be more distant than the farthest quasars, the current distance record holders: only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The researchers took the colors of different kinds of nearby galaxies and redshifted them on the computer to compare with the colors of galaxies observed by Hubble. For each galaxy they assigned a ''most probable'' redshift based on the best match to the ''spectral templates'' they developed. |