Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2019

JULY-AUGUST 2019 A stronomers developed a mosaic of the distant Universe, called the Hubble Legacy Field, that documents 16 years of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. The image contains more than 200,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the Big Bang. [NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth and D. Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz), K. Whitaker (University of Connecticut), R. Bouwens (Lei- den University), P. Oesch (University of Geneva), and the Hubble Legacy Field team] of galaxies in the universe, from their time as ‘infants’ to when they grew into fully-fledged ‘adults.’ No image will surpass this one until fu- ture space telescopes are launched.” “We’ve put together this mosaic as a tool to be used by us and by other astronomers,” Illingworth added. “The expectation is that this survey will lead to an even more coherent, in-depth, and greater understand- ing of the universe’s evolution in the coming years.” The image yields a huge catalog of distant galaxies. “Such exquisite high-resolution mea- surements of the numerous galaxies in this catalog enable a wide swath of extragalactic study,” said catalog lead researcher Katherine Whitaker of the University of Connecticut, in Storrs. “Often, these kinds of surveys have yielded unanticipated discover- ies which have had the greatest im- pact on our understanding of galaxy evolution.” Galaxies are the “markers of space,” as astronomer Edwin Hubble once