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Hubble gives astronomers a glimpse of the Big Bang

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

BALTIMORE -- Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope say they have reached far enough out in space and back in time to be within "a stone's throw" of the Big Bang itself.

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 on the Johns Hopkins campus unveiled what they said was the deepest telescopic view into the universe ever obtained.

Along with detecting roughly 10,000 galaxies, the million-second exposure of a small patch of dark sky in the constellation Fornax captured objects a quarter the faintness of previous surveys.

Several dozen faint reddish spots, the astronomers said, could even be infant galaxies just emerging from the "dark ages" that prevailed in the first half billion years after the Big Bang when stars were just beginning to form.

"We might have seen the end of the beginning," said Dr. Anton Koekenoer of the institute, who was part of the project.

He and others cautioned, however, that more work will be required before astronomers know if their surmises are correct. Astronomers will not be able to take a deeper picture 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 studied, said Dr. 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 with a frenzy on Tuesday morning, when the space telescope institute simultaneously unveiled the images and made the raw data available to the world at hubblesite.org.

Before Tuesday morning, Beckwith said, only four people had seen the image, and they had pledged among themselves 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," said Beckwith, who devoted his discretionary budget toward the immense amount of telescope time needed for the project -- 800 separate exposures spread out over four months.

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