NASA : Hubble captures expansive image of the universe

NASA released a new panorama Tuesday that looks deep and far into the universe and for the first time includes ultraviolet light, which is normally not visible to the human eye.

It shows up in the photo as bright baby blue with spinning galaxies, which are about 5 to 10 billion years old, not too old or young in cosmic terms.

Researchers had already looked at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) in both visible and near-infrared light. This new image used ultraviolet light, allowing for a full range of colors.

The remarkable image captures 10,000 galaxies and goes back hundreds of millions of years.

“The lack of information from ultraviolet light made studying galaxies in the HUDF like trying to understand the history of families without knowing about the grade-school children,” principal investigator Harry Teplitz of Caltech in Pasadena, California, said in the news release. “The addition of the ultraviolet fills in this missing range.”

Ultraviolet light comes from the hottest and youngest stars. Researchers can observe these wavelengths to determine which galaxies are in the process of forming stars and where exactly the stars are forming within the galaxy.

Studying these ultraviolet images in the intermediate time period allowed researchers to better-understand how galaxies grew by forming “collections” of ultra-hot stars. A space-based telescope was the only way to finally accomplish this feat.

“Ultraviolet surveys like this one using the unique capability of Hubble are incredibly important in planning for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope,” team member Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University in Tempe, said in the news release. “Hubble provides an invaluable ultraviolet-light dataset that researchers will need to combine with infrared data from Webb. This is the first really deep ultraviolet image to show the power of that combination.”

Agencies/Canadajournal