The Hubble Ultra Deep Field

This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just about 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004.

About the colours

Blue: F435W (B) Green: F606W (V) + F775W (i) Red: F850LP (z)

About the data

The science team for this release is: R. Bouwens and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz), J. Blakeslee (Washington State University), and M. Franx (Leiden Observatory).

This image was created from HST data from the following proposal: 9978 : HUDF Team (STScI).

The science teams are: • A.J. Bunker (Univ.of Exeter U.K./ Inst. of Astrophysics, Univ. of Cambridge, U.K.), E.R. Stanway (Inst. of Astrophysics, Univ. of Cambridge, U.K.), R.S. Ellis (California Inst. of Tech.), and R.G. McMahon (Inst. of Astrophysics, Univ. of Cambridge, U.K.) • H. Yan (Spitzer Science Center, California Inst. of Tech.) and R.A. Windhorst (Arizona State Univ.) • M. Stiavelli, S.M. Fall, and N. Panagia (STScI) • R.J. Bouwens and G.D. Illingworth (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz), R.I. Thompson (Steward Obs./Univ. of Arizona), J.P. Blakeslee (Johns Hopkins Univ.), M.E. Dickinson (National Optical Astronomy Obs.), T.J. Broadhurst (The Hebrew Univ., Israel), D.J. Eisenstein and X. Fan (Steward Obs./Univ. of Arizona), M. Franx (Leiden Observatory, Netherlands), G. Meurer (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and P. van Dokkum (Yale Univ.) • S. Malhotra, J.E. Rhoads, N. Pirzkal and C. Xu (Space Telescope Science Inst.)