Hubble Snaps Stunning Baby Pic of Cosmos

Thursday, June 19, 2003

(2:19 PM ET) (18:19 GMT)

Reuters

The GOODS image is sharp enough at great distances to allow astronomers to try to match up hundreds of X-ray sources -- thought to indicate black holes -- with the galaxies they inhabit.

Two of NASA's Great Observatories, bolstered by the largest ground-based telescopes around the world, are beginning to harvest new clues to the origin and evolution of the universe's largest building blocks, the galaxies. It's a bit like finding a family scrapbook containing snapshots that capture the lives of family members from infancy through adolescence to adulthood. The Hubble Space Telescope has joined forces with the Chandra X-ray Observatory to survey a relatively broad swath of sky encompassing tens of thousands of galaxies stretching far back in time. Called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), astronomers are studying galaxy formation and evolution over a wide range of distances and ages. (More) (

High Res Image - 1.25 Meg)

Image Credit: Hubble.org

WASHINGTON -- Reuters
A new wide-angle view of the universe looks back to a mere billion years after the Big Bang, revealing secrets about the lives of galaxies and the black holes at their hearts, scientists reported on Thursday.

The new view is contained in one extraordinary image, compiled by astronomers using a super-high-resolution camera aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, along with a catalog of objects giving off strong X-rays from space, detected by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, another NASA-affiliated instrument.

The image shows a section of sky about one-tenth the size of the full Moon viewed from Earth. Though this may seem narrow, it is about 30 times wider than the last deep look into the universe, the Hubble Deep Field observation released in 1996.

That earlier vision was described as a keyhole view; this one might reasonably be called a picture window.

Both images sought to peer far enough away from Earth to see back in time to when the light from some of the oldest galaxies headed toward our spot in the cosmos. They also captured cosmic objects from later periods.

As in that earlier path-breaking picture, the galaxies in the new image look like smudged jewels on black velvet, with distinct shapes and colors, their whirling arms and oval forms apparent.

But the new image, known as GOODS for Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, managed to look back further -- more than 12 billion years to when the universe was a billion years old. Astronomers put the age of the universe at roughly 13.7 billion years.

"In terms of time, we go from when the universe was about 15 percent of its current age to when it was 9 percent of its age," Mauro Giavalisco, a researcher who works with the Hubble data at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in a telephone interview.

* Leap back in time

(More: CNN.com)

2003 © Reuters, Ltd.

Dan