A NASA Hubble Space Telescope view down a 12 billion light-year long corridor of space loaded with a dazzling assortment of thousands of never-before seen galaxies. This picture is the culmination of a 10-day-long observation called the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S) which was carried out in October 1998 by a team of astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Goddard Space Flight Center. This new "far-look" complements the original Hubble "deep field" taken in late 1995, when Hubble was aimed at a small patch of space near the Big Dipper. The new region is in the constellation Tucana, near the south celestial pole. Hubble's sharp vision allows astronomers to sort galaxy shapes. The image is dominated by beautiful pinwheel-shaped disk galaxies, which are like our Milky Way. The picture also contains a variety of peculiar-shaped galaxies that are in collision with companion galaxies. Elliptical galaxies appear as reddish blobs. A sprinkling of foreground stars (belonging to our Milky Way) appear as bright points with "diffraction spikes" an artifact of all telescope optics. The colors in the pictures are a natural representation of the galaxies' stellar populations. Blue corresponds to young hot stars. Red may indicate older stars, starlight scattered by dust, or very distant starlight that has been stretched to redder wavelengths by the universe's expansion. Follow-up observations with large ground-based telescopes in the southern hemisphere will establish the distances to the galaxies. This will help astronomers understand the history of the universe because the galaxies represent the universe at different epochs, depending on their distances.
Credits
Credit: R. Williams (STScI), the HDF-S Team, and NASA| About The Object | |
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| Object Name | HDF-S |
| R.A. Position | 22h 32m 55.0s |
| Dec. Position | -60° 33' 10.0" |
| About The Object | |
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| 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 |
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| 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. |
