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Hubble Ultra Deep Field – Deep field · ~10,000 galaxies
Image: NASA and the European Space Agency. Edited by Noodle snacks · Public domain
💥 Cosmology · The Whole Universe

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Deep field · ~10,000 galaxies

Astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, seemingly empty patch of sky and collected light for days. The image revealed about 10,000 galaxies – some seen as they were less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

  • 13 billion light-years awayEven light – the fastest thing there is – needs 13 billion years to get here.
  • ~11 days in totalExposure
  • ~10,000Galaxies
🔭 Find it in the sky

Take a closer look

Galaxies of Every Shape

Nearer galaxies in the image look like neat spirals and smooth ovals, while the most distant ones are small, messy red smudges – young galaxies still putting themselves together. Only a few of the dots are stars in our own galaxy; almost everything else is a whole galaxy.

Light Older Than Earth

Much of the light in this picture set out on its journey before the Sun and Earth even existed, about 4.6 billion years ago. Some of those photons were already travelling for billions of years when our planet was still a ball of molten rock.

Colours Tell Distance

Hubble photographed the patch through several colour filters, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Because the expanding universe stretches light, the most distant galaxies look reddest – or vanish completely from the bluer filters – which lets astronomers estimate how far away each one is.

How we found out

  1. 1995

    The first Hubble Deep Field shows that “empty” sky is full of galaxies.

  2. 2004

    The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is released, built from about 800 exposures.

  3. 2022

    The James Webb Space Telescope begins taking even deeper images.

  4. 2024–25

    Webb finds galaxies that existed less than 300 million years after the Big Bang.

🤔 Something to wonder about

How can a telescope see back in time?

See it yourself

Point your phone where it is: you are pointing at 10,000 galaxies hidden in a tiny dark patch.

Got it?

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