Hubble telescope peers even further back into Cosmos’ past, taking deepest view yet

Submitted by ziwaooa on Wed, 2013-01-02 03:19

Instrumental in having pieced together, picture by picture, the cosmos, the Hubble telescope has, as it was revealed today, taken its most deepest view of the cosmos yet, discovering a number of new galaxies, some of which had been formed quite close to the Big Bang.

Led by a team from the California Institute of Technology and the University of Edinburgh, the new study had the Hubble Telescope study “redshifted” light, or light that emitted somewhere around 600 million years to 380 million years after the Big Bang. While quite difficult to detect, the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument was able to pick up this redshifted light, albeit only just, with the equipment only catching the faintest images of what the redshifted light had to offer.

In studying the data, the astronomers were able to detect six new galaxies as well as give a new estimate as to the distance of a seventh galaxy, placing it even further than had once been estimated. All of these new galaxies were discovered to have formed, in cosmological terms, quite recently after the Big Bang, a couple of hundred of million years to be exact, offering researchers new insights into how the cosmos unfolded all those billions of years ago.

Taking up to 100 hours of observation, the new research has updated the age of the galaxy, UDFj-39546284, which according to researchers was formed when the cosmos was just three percent of its current age, a whopping 13.77 billion years old. While initial research had shown UDFj-39546284 to have a redshift of 10, putting its formation around 480 million years after the Big Bang, making it the most distant object ever observed, the new Hubble observation puts it at an even higher redshift, making it even closer to the Big Bang.

Speaking about the new observations, NASA's associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, told reporters, "These are baby pictures of the Universe. These images are giving us the tantalizing view of what happened in the very earliest stages of the Universe. This is the time when the Universe was filled with hydrogen and starts to make stars and galaxies that make the chemical elements that we are primarily made out of - the oxygen we breathe, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones."

It must be noted that the present observations were at the utmost limit of Hubble’s capability and trying to observe light with higher redshits may not be possible, but the planned James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is set to be launched in 2018 will have the ability to do so and reveal even more about the cosmos’ past and the Big Bang.