This Is the Deepest View Into the Universe That Has Ever Been Seen

The HUDF region is in the constellation Fornax and is only a tenth of the size of the full moon. The astronomers specifically chose the this field of view to make their study, Brinchmann told Seeker.

“This is the best-studied spot on the sky,” he remarked, “thus we knew there was a lot of supporting data that would help us interpret our very deep observations.”

Brinchmann said being able to use the Hubble data along with the new data the team acquired was key in understanding their observations.

Hubble data “was very important for much of the analysis as it helped us disentangle objects that were blurred together by the Earth’s atmosphere,” he said via email. “In fact, in many ways it was a very mutually beneficial process — the value of the HST data are significantly enhanced by the information provided by MUSE, and without the HST data the MUSE results would be much less easy to interpret.”

The original HUDF image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth, with a total exposure time of 11.3 days between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004. The new observations by MUSE were taken over the course of two years with a total of 137 hours of telescope time.

MUSE was able to detect galaxies 100 times fainter than in previous surveys, seeing galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and elliptical galaxies were active about a billion years ago. The new observations provide additional information about galaxies formation and evolution across time.

Additionally, the team found luminous hydrogen halos around galaxies in the early universe, which provides new information of how material flows in and out of early galaxies.

The 72 newly found galaxies are ones that shine only in Lyman-alpha light, a form of ultraviolet light that usually indicates extremely distant objects. This is perplexing because galaxies that shine in only one form of light have not been seen before. These galaxies are ripe for further study.

Brinchmann and his colleagues weren’t expecting to find new galaxies in their observations.

“We were surprised,” he said. “Finding new galaxies is in itself not so exciting — we find loads everywhere we look if no-one has looked there before. But this was the best-studied part of the sky, with the deepest images that have ever been obtained, and it was a real surprise that we could find new galaxies that were not visible in these ultra-deep images from Hubble. We had not quite expected to go deeper than Hubble, forced as we were to peer through the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Other studies in the series of papers include analyzing galaxy merger rates in the early universe, mapping the motions of stars, and looking at the role of faint galaxies during the cosmic reionization that took place between 150 million years and 650 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies were formed.

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