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Early in Hubble's mission, it scanned a patch of sky for 10 days to collect 342 divide images. When assembled, they became the now-famous Hubble Deep Field. NASA has updated this iconic paradigm over the years every bit the telescope became more than powerful, and it's doing then again. Hubble may be inching toward obsolescence with the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), but it's still producing amazing images. The newest panoramic view of the universe shows more galaxies than ever before.

According to NASA, the new image features a whopping 15,000 galaxies, and 12,000 of them are star-forming (total prototype below). The original Deep Field image had a total of 3,000 galaxies, and the later 2003 Ultra-Deep Field bumped that number upwards to 10,000. About the same number appeared in the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) from 2022. The new mosaic image covers an area about 14 times larger than that of the XDF.

The image contains objects every bit they existed up to three billion years after the B ig Bang. It's an exceptionally detailed view of the universe because information technology comes from the Hubble Deep UV (HDUV) Legacy Survey. The final image contains data from infrared up through ultraviolet. Well-nigh ultraviolet calorie-free is filtered out by Earth's temper, and so yous can actually but do these observations in space. Hubble besides has a sensitive infrared adequacy, and many of the most afar objects are only visible in infrared because of the redshift from the expansion of the universe.

The farther abroad an object is, the older information technology is when viewed in a telescope. The galaxies in this paradigm all sit in a minor section of sky in the direction of the northern constellation Ursa Major, but they're distributed across billions of years.

The full Hubble panorama.

Astronomers are peculiarly interested in studying the star-forming galaxies in this image. The oldest objects in the epitome were active during the almost intense star formation events in the universe. Having both infrared and ultraviolet data sets help astronomers to track how galaxies (and therefore star formation) evolve over eons.

Hubble has performed admirably over the last quarter century, but we expected its successor to be online by now. The James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed several times, but information technology will possess fifty-fifty more than sensitive eyes that tin scan deep into the infrared. If this is what nosotros get with Hubble, but wait until the JWST starts operating.

At present read: James Webb Space Telescope Launch Pushed Back to 2022, Hubble Captures Mars and Saturn as They Pass Close to World, and Hubble Catches Some of the Primeval Stars Always Formed on Camera