The Hubble Space Telescope snaps new images of the oldest galaxies ever seen. A senior scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explains to WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz and Simon Constable how he did it-and what it means.
The new infrared camera that was loaded onto the Hubble Telescope earlier this year snapped these photos with an extraordinarily long shutter speed time — four days. And with this new capability astronomers can begin to see 13 billion years back in time to when the universe was just 600 million years old.
The James Webb Space Telescope will launch in 2014 to replace Hubble and to peer back even further in time, when some of these barely visible galaxies were just forming.
