NASA, Hubble Ultra Deep Field, 2006
This image was captured by Hubble Space Telescope’s advanced camera and depicts a small region of space containing an estimated 10,000 galaxies! Explore more below.
The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just about 800 million years old.
The nearest galaxies – the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals – thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old.
Blue galaxies are active and create newborn stars, which luminate the brightest.
See the size of Hubble’s Deep Field image in relation to the rest of the night sky:
Fun Facts
- The Hubble Space Telescope is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who used the hundred-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. His findings changed the way we view the universe.
- This one image looks back approximately thirteen billion years and captures a moment in celestial history between four and eight hundred million years after the Big Bang!
- It required eight hundred exposures taken over four hundred Hubble orbits around Earth, with a total exposure time of 11.3 days over several months in 2003–4, and the final image was released to the public in 2006.
Fly through deep space!
For your next stop on the Exploration Guide, head next door to the California Museum of Photography and look for this landscape:
