Hubble Space Telescope's largest-ever infrared image peers back 10 billion years

Astronomers are using the Hubble Space Telescope's largest near-IR image to look for targets for the James Webb Space Telescope.

The image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 and contains archive data from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. It spans 1.35 square degrees of the sky and contains thousands of galaxies. The aim is to identify the galaxies that will be studied in the future by telescopes.

Lamiya Mowla is an astronomer at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and leader of the new research. What drives the changes in their form? The design of this large survey was motivated by the fact that it was difficult to study these rare events.

There are the best Hubble Space Telescope images.

Ordinarily, it would take Hubble 2,000 hours' worth of observations to build an image this large, but Mowla's team used a new technique called drift and shift, which takes multiple shots and stitches them together, assembling individual images eight times larger than WFC3' Hubble could take eight images using the DASH technique. It took 250 hours to complete the entire WFC3 mosaic.

There are smudges of light in the picture. The light of brilliant star-forming regions within the most distant ones have been redshifted by the expansion of the universe. There is an online interactive version of the image from the 3D-Dash image explorer that gives you a more detailed view of the galaxies.

The increased light-gathering power of the newer telescope's mirror will allow it to scrutinize these galaxies in greater detail. The publication of the 3D-DASH data is timely because of the upcoming release of the first science-quality images from the project.

Astronomers will have to wait for the European Space Agency's Euclid mission and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will have larger fields of view, to get larger surveys.

A preprint version of the research can be found in the arXiv database.

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