With a year’s worth of data now in hand from a telescope survey of thousands of galaxies 6 to 8 billion light-years away, astronomers are filling in details about the midlife years of the nearly 14-billion-year-old universe.
“We’re looking back in time,” says Alison Coil of the University of California, Berkeley. “The light we’re seeing traveled for [at least] 6 billion years before it reached our telescope.”
The new results come from the first year of a 3-year sky survey, which is the second phase of a project known as the Deep Extragalactic Evolution Probe. In DEEP2, Coil and her colleagues are mapping galaxies within four distant, cone-shaped sections of the universe that are each about 2.5 billion light-years deep. Viewed from Earth, the base at the far end of each section is about the size of the full moon. The researchers presented their first findings last week at the annual meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Sydney, Australia.