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NASA fits 265,000 galaxies into a single ‘Hubble Legacy Field’ image
https://mashable.com/article/nasa-hubble-legacy-field-image/
Image: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth and D. Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz), K. Whitaker (University of Connecticut), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), P. Oesch (University of Geneva) and the Hubble Legacy Field team
Astronomers have assembled the most all-encompassing image of space ever created.
It puts together 16 years of data captured from the Hubble Space Telescope, according to a statement from NASA. All together, the composite is made up of nearly 7,500 individual exposures.
Dubbed the “Hubble Legacy Field,” this wide view image shows around 265,000 galaxies. These galaxies go back 13.3 billion years to 500 million years after the big bang, showcasing how they have changed over time.
This latest Hubble mosaic consists of around 30 times as many galaxies as previous deep fields did. For example, the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) which was put together in 2012 and is included in the Hubble Legacy Field, contains 5,500 galaxies.
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Become a founding member“The faintest and farthest galaxies are just one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see,” NASA said in its statement.
The findings from 31 different Hubble programs came together in order to assemble this image. According to NASA, no image will surpass the Hubble Legacy Field until the next generation of space telescopes are launched.
“Now that we have gone wider than in previous surveys, we are harvesting many more distant galaxies in the largest such dataset ever produced by Hubble,” said Garth Illingworth, who led the Hubble Legacy Field image team. “This one image contains the full history of the growth of galaxies in the universe, from their time as ‘infants’ to when they grew into fully fledged ‘adults.'”
“The expectation is that this survey will lead to an even more coherent, in-depth and greater understanding of the universe’s evolution in the coming years,” he added.
The James Webb Space Telescope, which will give astronomers an even deeper look into the legacy field, is expected to launch in 2021.
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