Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and the University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (UCO/Lick Observatory and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed 600 million years after the Big Bang. No galaxies have been seen before at such early times. The new deep view also provides insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the universe's history. The image was taken in the same region as the 2004 Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), which is the deepest visible-light image of the universe. Near-infrared wavelengths can look even deeper into the universe, because the light from very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe. This HUDF-IR image is one of the longest (or deepest) set of Hubble data, totaling four days of pointing for 173,000 seconds of total exposure time. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium, and long, near-infrared wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; red, 1.6 microns).

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2009/news-2009-31

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: http://hubblesite.org/copyright/