Astronomers have collected one of the most complete portraits of the evolutionary history of space, based on a wide range of observations of the Hubble Space Telescope and other space and ground-based telescopes. Hubble's UV vision opens a new window, tracking the birth of stars over the past 11 billion years in the busiest period of space (3 billion years after the Big Bang). The picture covers 15,000 galaxies, 12,000 of which have a stellar birth
Scientists using the UV-vision of the NASA Hubble Space Telescope have received one of the largest panoramic views of a bright stellar birth in a distant universe. The field covers 15,000 galaxies, of which 12,000 form stars. Hubble's UV vision opens a new window, tracking the birth of stars over the past 11 billion years in the busiest period of space (3 billion years after the Big Bang).
UV light was the missing element of the space puzzle. Now, in combination with IR and visible light data from Hubble and other space and ground-based telescopes, researchers have extracted one of the most complete portraits of the evolutionary history of the Universe. The picture captures the gap between very distant galaxies, which can only be viewed in IR light, and closer, observed in a wide range. Light from distant star-forming regions began as ultraviolet (UV). But the expansion of the universe shifted the light to infrared wavelengths (IR). By comparing the images of stellar birth in the distant and nearby Universe, astronomers better understand how nearby galaxies grew from small clusters of red-hot young stars.
The terrestrial atmosphere filters most of the UV rays, so Hubble is able to provide some of the most sensitive cosmic UV observations. The HDUV program is expanding and is based on Hubble's previous multiwave data in the field of CANDELS-Deep (Space Assembly near-infrared deep extragalactic review). This mosaic is 14 times larger than the Hubble’s Ultrafine Deep Field, released in 2014.
