the Hubble legacy field

the small version

Hubble’s Wide View of the Evolving Universe

This Hubble Space Telescope image represents the largest, most comprehensive “history book” of galaxies in the universe.

The image, a combination of nearly 7,500 separate Hubble exposures, represents 16 years’ worth of observations.

The ambitious endeavor, called the Hubble Legacy Field, includes several Hubble deep-field surveys, including the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest view of the universe. The wavelength range stretches from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, capturing all the features of galaxy assembly over time.

The image mosaic presents a wide portrait of the distant universe and contains roughly 265,000 galaxies. They stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the universe’s birth in the big bang. The tiny, faint, most distant galaxies in the image are similar to the seedling villages from which today’s great galaxy star-cities grew. The faintest and farthest galaxies are just one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

The wider view contains about 30 times as many galaxies as in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, taken in 2004. The new portrait, a mosaic of multiple snapshots, covers almost the width of the full Moon. Lying in this region is the XDF, which penetrated deeper into space than this legacy field view. However, the XDF field covers less than one-tenth of the full Moon’s diameter.

I don’t think we’re alone, just a long, long way from anyone else.

that image must be pretty close to as far out as the (for us) universes event horizon.

that image must be pretty close to as far out as the (for us) universes event horizon.

It could be argued that, as the universe is infinite and ever expanding, it can’t have an event horizon.

I think that’s the more impressive image. 265,000,000 galaxies in that space.

Yip, we’re definitely alone, no doubt about it! 😆

And also a bit of googling suggests that the area the Hubble Legacy Field takes up in the sky is about 1,000th of 1% of visible sky, assuming you’re somewhere dead flat and can see half a hemisphere of sky.

So that area of 265,000 galaxies, each with billions of stars, is repeated about 100,000 times in the night sky… And then there’s a whole other hemisphere of sky that you can’t see. It’s bonkers, when you think about it.

**** me, it’s mind boggling. The numbers I mean.

Ok I got a question that’s been puzzling me for a little while now…. it may well be stupid

What about the galaxies that are “behind” those ones in the picture.

With there being sooooo many galaxies surely “some” that are further away are obscured from our view by the ones that are closer…. or does the fact earth isn’t at fix point and indeed our galaxy is moving allow us to see behind the galaxies that are closest…..?

🤯🤯🤯😱

We are being watched..

🥴🤠

fact earth isn’t at fix point

I would expect that our position relative to anything in that is as good as expected to be a fixed point.

It could be argued that, as the universe is infinite and ever expanding, it can’t have an event horizon.

What is it expanding into? 😉

as the universe is infinite

Is it?

as the universe is infinite

Is it?

Actually quite an interesting question. In the terms described by the poster, he is not incorrect. We currently estimate the universe is 13.6bn (ish) lightyears across, but as our information on that is 13.6bn years old, and we can measure that the expansion is accelerating, to all intents and purposes one point of view is that it is infinite.

Can they not “see” behind those galaxies as the light is bent by the gravitatinonal pull?