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Deepest look ever into the universe 'Stone's throw' view closes in on Big Bang

Posted on: Wednesday, 10 March 2004, 06:00 CST

Like Moses being led to the mountain to see the promised land he would never visit, the Hubble Space Telescope has now seen to within a stone's throw of the Big Bang itself, astronomers said here Tuesday.

In a ceremony that was part science workshop, part political rally and part starting gun for an astronomical gold rush, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins unveiled what they said was the deepest telescopic view into the universe that humankind had ever obtained.

Among the roughly 10,000 new galaxies revealed by a million- second exposure of a small patch of dark sky in the constellation Fornax are several dozen faint reddish spots that could be infant galaxies just emerging from the dark ages that prevailed in the first half billion years after the Big Bang, when stars had not yet had time to form, the astronomers said.

We might have seen the end of the beginning, said Anton Koekemoer of the institute. He and others cautioned, however, that more work would be required before astronomers knew if their surmises were correct.

The look at the universe will not be superseded until the James Webb Space Telescope goes into orbit in 2011. When the new image, known officially as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, has been analyzed, said Steven Beckwith, the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, we expect it to reveal new secrets to the origin of stars and galaxies, and ultimately ourselves.

The first bits of that work began Tuesday, when the space institute simultaneously unveiled the images and made the raw data available at hubblesite.org. Before Tuesday, Beckwith said, only four people had seen the image and they had pledged not to work on it ahead of time, so as not to give the home team an advantage. I wanted it to be like the great land rush where the gun is fired and everybody takes off, he said.

The occasion also served as a reminder of the power and the glory of the Hubble telescope at a time when it is operating under a controversial death sentence. On Jan. 17, just a day after the Hubble had completed its marathon squint, NASA's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, said any space shuttle missions to the telescope would be too unsafe and canceled them, dooming the Hubble to die a lingering death within three years.

The decision set off an outcry among scientists, the public and on Capitol Hill. In response to a protest by Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, home of the space telescope, O'Keefe agreed to get a second opinion from Admiral Harold Gehman, who was chairman of an investigation into shuttle Columbia disaster last year. His response is expected soon. Last week, congressmen introduced a resolution in the House Science Committee calling on NASA to create an independent panel to study the question.

The astronomers denied that Tuesday's event was timed to capitalize on the uproar. But Mikulski walked in unannounced to the telescope institute, and said in a short speech, The future of the Hubble should not be decided by one man in a NASA back room without a transparent process.

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