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When we look at the night sky, how far back in time can we see?
January 8, 2021 at 11:22 am
When we look up at the stars, we are looking back in time. The light entering our eyes from these distant objects set off years, decades or millennia earlier. Every time we look at something ‘up there’ we’re seeing it as it was in the past.
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With enormous modern telescopes and sensitive detectors, professional astronomers can see far beyond what most back garden telescopes are capable of. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) was created by using 10 years of Hubble Space Telescope images and reveals galaxies spanning 13.2 billion years in time: about 0.6 years after the birth of the Universe. The deep field captures such distant light, most of the galaxies are seen as they existed in their infancy. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team