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Friday January 8, 2010
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The Hubble Space Telescope, with its newly-added infrared Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), has discovered new "primordial" galaxies 13.2 billion years old--the oldest ever discovered, and just 500 to 600 million years after the Big Bang, the Space Telescope Science Institute reports.
"The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe," the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement.
Five separate international teams of astronomers have analyzed the
WFC3's new images, first taken from the Ultra Deep Field in August
2009. Many are presenting papers this week at the 215th meeting of the
American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.
"With the rejuvenated Hubble and its new instruments, we are now entering uncharted territory that is ripe for new discoveries," says Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, leader of one of the survey teams, in the report.
"The faintest galaxies are now showing signs of linkage to their origins from the first stars. They are so blue that they must be extremely deficient in heavy elements, thus representing a population that has nearly primordial characteristics," said Rychard Bouwens, another member of the same team.
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