Saturday, January 29, 2011

Looking back to the childhood of the universe.

The images above, starting on the left and rotating to the bottom right, are successive magnifications of the same patch of sky, made using the Hubble Space Telescope. The blurred object in the bottom right photo is the most distant galaxy yet observed. It's about 13.2 billion light years away. Since the Big Bang was about 13.7 billion years ago, light reaching us from this galaxy originated within about half a billion years from the beginning of the universe, when it was in its infancy.

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