The Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014 – the most colorful and comprehensive picture ever assembled of the evolving Universe – has been captured by an international team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014. Image credit: NASA / ESA / H. Teplitz, M. Rafelski, IPAC, Caltech / A. Koekemoer, STScI / R. Windhorst, Arizona State University / Z. Levay, STScI.
This image is a composite of separate exposures taken in 2003 to 2012 with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC 3).
Astronomers previously studied the Hubble Ultra Deep Field – a small section of space in the constellation Fornax – in visible and near-infrared light in a series of images captured from 2003 to 2009.
Now, using ultraviolet light, they have combined the full range of colors available to Hubble, stretching all the way from ultraviolet to near-infrared light.
The addition of ultraviolet data to the Hubble Ultra Deep Field using WFC 3 gives astronomers access to direct observations of regions of unobscured star formation and may help us to fully understand how stars formed.
By observing at these wavelengths, they get a direct look at which galaxies are forming stars and, just as importantly, where the stars are forming.
This enables astronomers to understand how galaxies like the Milky Way grew in size from small collections of very hot stars to the massive structures they are today.
“The lack of information from ultraviolet light made studying galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field like trying to understand the history of families without knowing about the grade-school children. The addition of the ultraviolet fills in this missing range,” said team member Dr Harry Teplitz of California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
The resulting image, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014, was made from 841 orbits of Hubble’s viewing time.
It contains about 10,000 galaxies, extending back in time to within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang.
“Ultraviolet surveys like this one using the unique capability of Hubble are incredibly important in planning for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope,” said team member Dr Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University in Tempe.
“Hubble provides an invaluable ultraviolet-light dataset that researchers will need to combine with infrared data from Webb. This is the first really deep ultraviolet image to show the power of that combination.”
