New Hubble pictures released

17 Jun 2002

Six new images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope were released this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Antonio, Texas. Among the collection, several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in the "deepest-ever" view of the universe, called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Besides the classical spiral and elliptical shaped galaxies, a bewildering variety of other galaxy shapes and colors are visible, providing important clues to understanding the evolution of the universe. Some of the galaxies may have formed less that one billion years after the Big Bang.

Representing a narrow "keyhole" view all the way to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of sky 1/30th the diameter of the full Moon (about 25% of the entire HDF is shown here). This is so narrow, just a few foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy are visible and are vastly outnumbered by the menagerie of far more distant galaxies, some nearly as faint as 30th magnitude, or nearly four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision.

View the Hubble images on the World Wide Web at the URL below.