Earliest photo of universe captured
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe - just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.
Scientists released the photo at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Tuesday. It's the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.
These young galaxies haven't yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and quite blue in color. That's mostly because at this stage, they don't contain many heavy metals, said Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomy professor who was among those releasing the photo.
"We're seeing very small galaxies that are seeds of the great galaxies today," Illingworth said.
Text: AP
Image: This undated handout photo provided by NASA, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows a snapshot of when the universe was just a toddler, 600 million years after the Big Bang, the earliest image yet. (Photograph copyright AP)
