By Ron Cowen
Astronomers this week unveiled the deepest visible-light portrait of the universe ever made. Compiled by the Hubble Space Telescope as it stared into a narrow corridor of space more than 13 billon light-years long, the mosaic of images also includes infrared pictures of what appear to be the most distant objects detected so far.
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Dubbed the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF), the images feature a panoply of galaxy shapes, from the classic spirals and ellipticals common in the cosmos today to a zoo of misshapen oddballs that may be among the first galaxies to have coalesced. Follow-up studies to measure just how remote these galaxies are may require a new generation of telescopes, but some of these bodies could hail from a time when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was only about 300 million years old, the UDF astronomers say.