This is a Hubble Space Telescope view of a random patch of sky that reveals how the universe looks at large: a "wallpaper" of innumerable galaxies spread across space and time. They offer a wide assortment of majestic star cities that vary in age, shape, and stellar populations. It’s a narrow view down a corridor that stretches back in time for billions of years.
The wide range of rich colors comes from the fact that this snapshot is assembled from images taken in visible light as well as near-infrared light. The reddest objects in the image are presumably the farthest galaxies, whose light has been stretched into the red part of the spectrum by the expansion of space. The yellow objects are massive football-shaped elliptical galaxies that contain older stellar populations. The blue galaxies are disk-shaped pinwheels of ongoing star formation. The entire field is peppered with much smaller, fragmentary, blue galaxies – the "building blocks" ancestors of majestic spiral galaxies like our Milky Way.
This so-called "parallel field" was taken while Hubble was looking at the primary target, a massive foreground galaxy cluster, while another camera simultaneously viewed the adjacent, seemingly sparse patch of sky.
Such parallel fields increase the efficiency of Hubble for deep sky surveys, and yield new insights into the evolution of galaxies over billions of years.
Credits
NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz and the HFF Team (STScI)| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | Abell 370 Parallel |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description | Abell 370 is part of the Frontier Fields Program. These data are from the HST proposals (PI: E. Hu, University of Hawaii), (PI: K. Noll, GSFC), (PI: J.-P. Kneib, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille), (PI: T. Treu, UCLA), (PI: S. Rodney, JHU), (PI: J. Lotz, STScI), and (R. Kirshner, Harvard University). For more information, see . |
| Instrument | HST>ACS/WFC and HST>WFC3/IR |
| Exposure Dates | September 2009 - February 2015 |
| Filters | ACS/WFC: F435W, F606W, and F814W; WFC3/IR: F105W, F125W, F140W, and F160W |
| About The Image | |
| Color Info | Blue: F435W + F606W Green: F814W + F105W Red: F125W + F140W + F160W |
| Compass Image |  |
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | A name or catalog number that astronomers use to identify an astronomical object. |
| Object Description | The type of astronomical object. |
| R.A. Position | Right ascension – analogous to longitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Dec. Position | Declination – analogous to latitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Constellation | One of 88 recognized regions of the celestial sphere in which the object appears. |
| Distance | The physical distance from Earth to the astronomical object. Distances within our solar system are usually measured in Astronomical Units (AU). Distances between stars are usually measured in light-years. Interstellar distances can also be measured in parsecs. |
| Dimensions | The physical size of the object or the apparent angle it subtends on the sky. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description |
|
| Instrument | The science instrument used to produce the data. |
| Exposure Dates | The date(s) that the telescope made its observations and the total exposure time. |
| Filters | The camera filters that were used in the science observations. |
| About The Image | |
| Image Credit | The primary individuals and institutions responsible for the content. |
| Publication Date | The date and time the release content became public. |
| Color Info | A brief description of the methods used to convert telescope data into the color image being presented. |
| Orientation | The rotation of the image on the sky with respect to the north pole of the celestial sphere. |
