Home Science Space Hubble sees 13.2 billion years back into the universe
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The Hubble Space Telescope has gathered in light from 13.2 billion years ago -- to the early beginnings of our universe. It is the furthest back in time that we have ever seen!

The elder space telescope called Hubble -- it was launched into space in 1990 by the National Space and Aeronautics Administration (NASA) and have been repaired five times by NASA astronauts over its lifetime -- is still at work and doing quite well for its advanced age.

It has just looked further back into time than any other telescope: 3.2 billion years ago when the universe was only about half a billion years old (just an infant in terms of the ages of universes.

The current estimate of the age of our universe is 13.75 plus or minus 0.11 billion years. (See the Discovery News article The Universe is Precisely 13.75 Billion Years Old concerning this numerical figure for the age of the universe.)

The image take by Hubble shows thousands of galaxies that are billions of light-years away (where one light-year is the distance that light travels in one year within the vacuum of space, with a value of about 299,792,458 meters per second, or about 10 trillion kilometers (6 trillion miles) in one year.

The image taken by Hubble is called the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF). According to the Fox News article Hubble telescope reveals farthest view into universe ever, the Hubble image "combines 10 years of Hubble telescope views of one patch of sky. Only the accumulated light gathered over so many observation sessions can reveal such distant objects, some of which are one ten-billionth the brightness that the human eye can see."

According to Dr. Garth Illingworth, from the University of California (Santa Cruz), who is the principal investigator for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field program, "The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before."  

Fox News describes the image by stating: "The photo reveals a wide range of galaxies, from spirals that are Milky Way-lookalikes, to hazy reddish blobs that are the result of collisions between galaxies. Some of the very tiny, faint galaxies could be the seeds from which the biggest galaxies around today grew."  

And, according to a NASA statement: "The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a 'time tunnel into the distant past. The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang."

NOTE: The title was corrected to 13.2 billion from 3.2 billion -- big mistake on my part.

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William Atkins

William Atkins completed educational degrees in science (bachelor’s in physics and mathematics) from Illinois State University (Normal, United States) and business (master’s in entrepreneurship and bachelor’s in industrial relations) from Western Illinois University

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