Hubble Goes Deep

A camera that is particularly sensitive to infrared light, installed earlier this year, has extended the Hubble Space Telescope's (HST) reach even farther out into deep space and back in time than its already astonishing data set has gathered so far.

The BBC reports that HST's recently installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) is designed for greater sensitivity to the infrared bands of light, not visible to the human eye, which are indicative of more distant bodies whose light emissions are stretched through universe expansion.

As reported, images of galaxies recently picked up by WFC3 and sent back down to Earth are of the most distant objects ever identified. The findings were achieved by two research teams in the UK, and are currently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomy Society.

The findings are preliminary to the point that the exact age and distance of the objects have not been pinpointed. But the characteristics of the light signature strongly suggest that the recent findings represent our farthest reach into deep space telescopy.

Further investigation of the recently found galaxies are certainly anticipated. But just as your new car loses a thousand dollars in value the second you drive it off the lot, data gathered by the WFC3 is likely to deteriorate as the camera ages.

More refined understanding may need to wait for a few years when the replacement to the Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), heads for the launch pad in 2014.

Photo courtesy of NASA, via Wikimedia Commons