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UBC researchers watching infant galaxies

New space telescope showing images of 12 billion-year-old deep space

Gaelen Marsden, a University of British Columbia astronomer, has produced the most detailed images of young galaxies ever seen. The pictures, created from light that took 12 billion years to reach the earth, are of tens of thousands of newly discovered galaxies and show them in their development only one billion years after the big bang. “These images allow us to see 10 times more galaxies than ever before and with stunning clarity,” says Marsden. They were collected using the recently launched European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, the largest space telescope ever built. The UBC researchers results are part of a worldwide project called the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES) which aims to use the telescope to map out the 13.7 billion-year-old universe as it was up to 12 billion years ago.

UBC

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