Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have just released the most detailed view of the early Universe ever captured. It's called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF for short. The image combines over ten years' worth of photographs by Hubble. It required 2-million seconds of exposure time to produce, and contains over 5,500 of the Universe's most ancient galaxies. This image is more than jaw-dropping; to quote Hubble astronomers, this remarkable view pushes outward against the very frontiers of time and space.
Almost every visible object in this image is a galaxy, each one brimming with billions of celestial bodies. The most far-flung among them loom over 13-billion light years from Earth. The light that Hubble's instruments receive from these galaxies began its journey just a few hundred million years after the birth of the Universe.
