Wires, lots more: Hubble’s deepest field ever. Lots of (familiar looking) galaxies, .. Plus a Wash. Post perspective on Hubble’s bling
Never mind all that dark matter stuff. It’s dark. You want to see something out there, you ask the people who run the old yet nearly spanking new, ultra-superpowered Hubble Space Telescope and they’ll give you an ultra super duper deep field picture of the oldest galaxies (or, actually, newest when corrected for light speed and time delay) yet seen. Farthest away and best focussed, for sure. Plenty of outlets jumped on the news yesterday from NASA – if only briefly for how much can one say in today’s news holes about a field of galaxies? The astronomers aimed Hubble’s best, shuttle-freshened-up wide field camera at the same place that yielded its ultra deep field exposure in its last incarnation. One is unsure exactly what this picture is called. It succeeds the earlier ultra, which in turn succeeded the plain old Hubble Deep Field. The press release down there in grist just calls it the deepest view of the universe yet.
A higher res version of that pic top right is here.
Stories:
- USA Today – Dan Vergano: Hubble telescope looks into deepest space yet.
- Register (UK) Lester Haines: Hubble probes deepest universe ;
- CNET News – Don Reisinger: Hubble peers deeper than ever into the universe ; He helpfully points out that this ever-deeper business is due for expansion, as soon as and if the James Webb Space Telescope gets into orbit in another five years or so.
- BBC – Victoria Gill: Hubble sees most distant galaxies ; Nice job, including a pause to explain the stretching of wavelengths that shifts these distant things’ color. She eschews the term Dopller shift, but does call a gravity lensing man for more context on this image. His team says it, actually, got images (albeit distorted) of farther galaxies.
- AP: Hubble spies never-before-seen galaxies ;
In the been-there- done-that dept:
- ScienceNews – Ron Cowen (SEPT 26!): New Images and Spectra From a Rejuvenated Hubble ; Cowen told us all that this was coming.
Grist for the Mill:
NASA Hubble Site ; Press Release with link to a nifty, zoomable, scrollable version of the image. It makes you feel like captain of an intergalactic star ship sailing the farthest horizon.
RELATED NEWS that makes the latest news easier to sort:
Meanwhile, are we all getting “pretty-Hubble-picture burnout” ? That’s what the 
Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach asked in The Wow Factor, carried by the paper’s Sunday magazine. It came out before the new deepest field yet, but today’s news fits Achenbach’s question. As far as the public can tell, the galaxies in the deep field and the ultra deep field and the to-the-Nth deep field look pretty much the same. Achenbach spent some time on this article, finding out and relaying to readers just what physical processes way out there in space are illustrated by some of the most recent, prettiest pictures that might to many seem more of the same.
- Charlie Petit
