A new Hubble Space Telescope image has given astronomers their deepest ever view into the Universe - and started a race to decipher it.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image reveals some of the farthest and youngest galaxies ever seen, whose light was previously too faint to be detected. It includes objects from a mere 500 million years after the Big Bang; the Universe is thought to be 13-14 billion years old.
To produce the image, Hubble focused on a spot in the sky in the Fornax constellation, below Orion, between September 2003 and January 2004. The collected data were released to eager scientists around the world on Tuesday 9 March.
Scientists say that the image surpasses the telescope's previous efforts: the Hubble Deep Field images taken in 1995 and 1998. It was collected over 410 orbits of the Earth, several hundred more than was used for the earlier images.
Look here for links to the images: Hubblesite. (links to temporary mirror sites for now)
Beautiful.
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