Hubble Ultra Deep Field image released

Click on the image at the bottom to get the high-res view - it's absolutely fantastic!! Hats off to the STScI guys and gals.....

Brian

www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=13803

WOW ... that is really amazing!

If you go to the full sized image and just scan through it you will see every shape and size of galaxy imaginable ... really cool!

Bart.

If you go to the full sized image

If your computer is up to displaying 100Mb tiff images!

One thing though, I would have expected there to be evidence of gravitational lensing in the image but there isnt. The more I look at these images the more confised I get...

Cheers,
~Al

Gravitational lensing...sounds to me like you're trying to find all that so-called "missing mass". Good luck in finding it !
Seriously though, it was something that struck me too. Could it be that the galaxies are in such an early stage that their mass is much lower than the galaxies we're used to looking at - i.e older galaxies. For example, our Milky Way is currently swallowing up another galaxy at the moment if recent reports in S&T are to believed. Some time in the future, we'll merge with the Andromeda Galaxy and many others in the distant future thus resulting in a galaxy with a much larger mass than we started off with.
However, the galaxies we see in the image are probably just first generation and thus their mass is too low to cause noticable lensing...would that a fair assumption :
Where's our resident cosmologist when you need him :

Michael

Gravitational lensing...sounds to me like you're trying to find all that so-called "missing mass". Good luck in finding it !

well if theres a nice research grant going I could work on it

Seriously though, it was something that struck me too. Could it be that the galaxies are in such an early stage that their mass is much lower than the galaxies we're used to looking at - i.e older galaxies. For example, our Milky Way is currently swallowing up another galaxy at the moment if recent reports in S&T are to believed. Some time in the future, we'll merge with the Andromeda Galaxy and many others in the distant future thus resulting in a galaxy with a much larger mass than we started off with.
However, the galaxies we see in the image are probably just first generation and thus their mass is too low to cause noticable lensing...would that a fair assumption :

The milky way is only swallowing up a few small bits and peices, probably leftovers from the local group, or tidal leftovers from the last time the Magellanic clouds came near. None of the galaxies in the image appear to be colliding, but the dont look to be that small either. I would have expected there to be lots of interaction between the galaxies at this stage.

There are all sorts of galaxies there as Bart pointed out, some very well developed spirals, and thats very well developed for an image looking at ~800million years after the big bang. It _looks_ suspiciously like a condensed version of any nearby galaxy cluster. It takes the sun 200 million years to orbit the milky way, so these galaxies seem surprisingly well formed, independent for 800million year olds!

Where's our resident cosmologist when you need him :

Dont cosmologists go into hiding when astronomers give them evidence of anything?

Cheers,
~Al