Motherboard

NASA tells us that the Hubble Space Telescope has taken “the deepest photograph of the universe ever made in near-infrared light. The picture reveals several thousands of far-flung galaxies. The farthest, merely dim points of light in this view, offer a peek at the universe as it looked just 600 million years after the Big Bang. No galaxies have ever been seen before at such early times. This image reveals the emergence of stars and galaxies in the infant universe’s formative years.”

This imagery is deep indeed: it’s useful for understanding the origins of the universe, and perhaps for jogging our memories about where we were 600 million years after the Big Bang. With the data, astronomers are now feverishly searching for the most distant galaxies; in just three months, twelve scientific papers on these new data have been submitted.

Some deets about the image (full size version): it was taken during a total of four days of pointing for 173 000 seconds of total exposure time. Though taken in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye and thus does not have colors that can be perceived, this representation is made “natural”: shorter infrared wavelengths are represented as blue and longer wavelengths as red. The faintest objects are about one billion times fainter than the dimmest visible objects seen with the naked eye. In other words, you are not getting this camera for Christmas.

These Hubble observations are blazing a trail for Hubble’s successor, the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will look even farther into the Universe than Hubble, at infrared wavelengths. The launch of JWST is planned for 2014. On Friday, a precursor to the JWST, the WISE, launches in California.

Insert obligatory joke here about pointing this thing at Tora Bora’s black holes and finding Osama. Yuk yuk.

If this doesn’t move you, see the Daft Punk version.

_Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon and M. Estacion (STScI). h/t to PhysOrg _