WASHINGTON (AP) – The Hubble
Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe — just 600
million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.
Scientists released the photo
Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It's the most
complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that
are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable
primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.
These young galaxies haven't
yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and
quite blue in color. That's mostly because at this stage, they don't contain
many heavy metals, said Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa
Cruz, astronomy professor who was among those releasing the photo.
"We're seeing very small
galaxies that are seeds of the great galaxies today," Illingworth said in
a news conference.
Until NASA's Hubble telescope
was repaired and upgraded last year, the farthest back in time that astronomers
could see was about 900 million years after the Big Bang, Illingworth said.
Hubble has been key in helping determine the age of the universe at about 13.7
billion years, ending a long scientific debate about a decade ago.
As far back as Hubble can
see, it still doesn't see the first galaxies.
For that, NASA will have to
rely on a new observatory, the $4.5 billion James Webb telescope, which is set
to launch in about four years.
"We are on the way to
the beginning," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American
Museum of Natural History. "Every step closer to the beginning tells you
something you did not know before."
The new Hubble picture
captures those distant simpler galaxies juxtaposed amid closer, newer and more
evolved ones. The result is a cosmic family photo that portrays galaxies at
different ages and stages of development over the course of more than 13
billion years.
Tyson, who was not involved
in the Hubble image research, said most people only like their own baby
pictures, but Hubble's photo is different: "These are the baby pictures
for us all, hence the widespread interest."
