“To our surprise, the results show that these galaxies at 700 million
years after the Big Bang must have started forming stars hundreds of millions of years earlier, pushing back the time of the earliest star formation in the universe.”
- Ivo Labbe, Ph.D., Carnegie Institute of Washington
“These galaxies are only 1/20th the Milky Way's diameter.
...Yet they must be the seeds from which the great galaxies of today
were formed.”
- Pascal Oesch, Ph.D., and Marcella Carollo, Ph.D.,
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
“The faintest galaxies are now showing signs of linkage
to their origins from the first stars. They are so blue that they
must be extremely deficient in heavy elements, thus representing
a population that has nearly primordial characteristics.”
Section of earliest image yet taken of our universe by the Hubble Space Telescope, only 600 - 700 million years after the Big Bang that started our universe. The circled objects are light from “primordial galaxies” back 13 billion years ago of our 13.7-billion-year-old-universe in this unprecedented view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly. Hubble Center: “This is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The faintest and reddest objects (left inset) in the image are galaxies that correspond to ‘look-back times’ of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago. No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs. These galaxies are much smaller than the Milky Way galaxy and have populations of stars that are intrinsically very blue. This may indicate the galaxies are so primordial that they are deficient in heavier elements, and as a result, are quite free of the dust that reddens light through scattering.” Object Name: HUDF WFC3/IR. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth and R. Bouwens, UC-Santa Cruz and the HUDF09 Team.Portion of earliest universe photographed so far by Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble's WFC3/IR camera was able to make deep exposures to uncover new galaxies at roughly 40 times greater efficiency than its earlier infrared camera that was installed in 1997.
January 6, 2010 Baltimore, Maryland - NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe. This makes Hubble a powerful “time machine” that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago, just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang that started our universe.
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