Hubble Deep Field
Photographer: NASA/ESA Hubble
Date: December 1995
Location: Ursa Major constellation
In December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at a seemingly blank patch of sky in the constellation Ursa Major for ten consecutive days, accumulating light to reveal the universe's distant past. The resulting image — the Hubble Deep Field — showed approximately 3,000 galaxies at various stages of evolution, some dating back to less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The image had a profound impact on cosmology, revealing that the universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies. Because light travels at a finite speed, the most distant galaxies in the image are seen as they existed billions of years ago. The success of the Hubble Deep Field led to subsequent deeper images, including the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field and the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field.
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