The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted of a
collection of galaxies with more variety than a candy store.
Some are big; some are
small. Some are old; some are new. Some are nearby; some are far away.
But one thing many of the
hundreds of galaxies have in common is that they've never been seen until
Hubble recently captured their light.
This image, which covers a
patch of sky only a fraction of the area of a full moon, provides a typical
view of the far-off places in the universe. As some of these galaxies a re
billions of light-years away in space, looking down this long corridor of
galaxies is like looking billions of years back in time.
The larger, brighter
galaxies in the image are large, fully formed galaxies that are relatively
close to us. Several of them are spirals with flat disks that are oriented
either edge-on, face-on, or somewhere in between to Hubble. You can also see
elliptical galaxies and other more exotic shapes with bars or tidal tails.
The smaller galaxies are
actually just further away and are faint because their light has taken billions
of years to reach us. So, in fact, the light from these galaxies is coming from
a much younger version than what exists - or doesn't - today.
At least a dozen stars from
our own Milky
Way Galaxy dot the foreground of this image, the brightest of which is the
large red object in the center. Stars are easily spotted by their diffraction
spikes - the long cross hair lines that come from their centers. These are an
image artifact caused when starlight travels through a telescope's optical
system.
This image is a composite of
multiple single field exposures taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys in
Sept. 2003. The image took nearly 40 hours to complete - one of the longest
exposures ever taken by Hubble.
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