Holy holy crap!!!

I’ve never seen anything quite so amazing.

This is the Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF) image.  It follows the amazing Hubble Deep Field (HDF) and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field images (HUDF).

Everything you see in this image is a galaxy. Every. Thing.  About 5500 galaxies.

This image is a composite of images from the HUDF and more recent images.  The original HUDF was just over 3 arcminutes in size, or imagine standing on Earth looking up at the sky and holding out at arms length a square piece of 1mm x 1mm  paper.   This image covers a smaller part of the sky, focusing on just the centre area of the original HUDF.  A tiny, tiny fraction of the sky. And when we look at that spec of sky what do we see? Thousands and thousands of galaxies, all at various stages of growth and ages.

The universe is ~13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. This is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the most distant (and oldest) galaxies ever seen, or imaged. We are looking back in time and seeing galaxies only 450 million years or so after they were formed in the Big Bang.

Mind. Boggled.

Sharon

For a large resolution image look here on the Hubble site.

For more information go to the Hubble site!