The Hubble Space Telescope has been busy for the past decade. After looking at the same spot in the sky for a total of 2 million seconds it has produced what NASA calls the "farthest-ever" portrait of the universe, reports Rebecca J. Rosen.
The resulting image, or compilation of images, is called eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF. The photo below "contains around 5,500 galaxies, some of which are one ten-billionth the brightness visible to the human eye...For the oldest galaxies in the image, the light now reaching us first shone some 13.2 billion years ago, more than 8.6 billion years before Earth even existed," says Rosen.
"Perhaps more mind-boggling than the number of objects in the image, or just how far away they are, is what a tiny speck of the night sky they all sit in." See the article for an illustratation and video depicting the teensy part of the sky shown in the image.
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