NASA has released one of the most colorful, detailed and complex photos of the universe, though its vast expanses can never be captured in one shot.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the new image, which the Hubble Telescope captured, has so much depth that some of the spatial beings date back hundreds of millions of years. Harry Teplitz, an astronomer at the California Technical Institute in Pasadena, told the newspaper the image is long when seen on its side and narrow when seen straight ahead.
"It is a small patch of sky, much smaller than the size of the moon, but because Hubble can see light from very distant galaxies, it goes back 12 billion years," he said. "The reason you see so many galaxies in the image is because they are at many different distances."
Teplitz led a team of researchers who published a study titled "Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field."
"Ultraviolet is where we see the hottest light from the youngest stars," Teplitz, said. "It is a direct measure of star formation."
The Caltech astronomer told the Times many of the universe's stars formed around five to 10 billion years ago. Thanks to images like this, astronomers can see what it looked like when some of the oldest stars in the universe formed.
"Ultraviolet surveys like this one using the unique capability of Hubble are incredibly important in planning for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope," study team member Dr. Rogier Windhorst, of Arizona State University in Tempe, said in a NASA press release. "Hubble provides an invaluable ultraviolet light dataset that researchers will need to combine with infrared data from Webb. This is the first really deep ultraviolet image to show the power of that combination."
Ultraviolet light only comes from hot, large and young stars and their wavelengths are only visible with space-based telescopes.
"The lack of information from ultraviolet light made studying galaxies in the HUDF like trying to understand the history of families without knowing about the grade-school children," Teplitz said in the release. "The addition of the ultraviolet fills in this missing range."
