Have you ever wondered just how far deep into space you can actually see? Well, now you don’t have to. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the farthest-ever view into the Universe in a single photo. The picture, called eXtreme Deep Field (or XDF) shows thousands of galaxies that are billions of light-years away. The photo combines 10 years of Hubble telescope views of one patch of sky, ensuring that as many objects as possible could be captured.
The XDF is the deepest image of the Universe to date and shows over 5,000 galaxies. The red blobs are the result of collisions between galaxies. Many of the galaxies are billions of light-years away, meaning their light has taken billions of years to travel into the Hubble’s cameras.
According to NASA, “The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a ‘time tunnel into the distant past’… The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang.”
The incredible image will be updated again when Hubble’s successor, The James Webb Space Telescope, launches in 2018. For now, this is one of the most impressive pictures to ever be taken of the Universe!