The Hubble Space Telescope has once again outdone itself in piercing the veil of the mysteries in our cosmic past. According to NASA, the orbiting space telescope has snapped an image of galaxies approximately 13 billion light years away creating a snapshot of some of the earliest galaxies ever photographed by mankind.
The image above was shot using the telescope’s new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3/IR), which was installed by astronauts earlier in 2009. The new camera used near infrared light to capture the picture of galaxies formed 600 million to 900 million years after the Big Bang. Understandably, NASA and other telescope enthusiasts around the globe are excited about the discovery.
News Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Ray Villard said:
At these distances, you’re really looking back in time, like you have a time machine. Those things don’t exist anymore.
But NASA isn’t going to just sit on this latest Hubble accomplishment and has plans for even more outstanding galactic photography in years to come. In 2014 a new telescope named the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched and is expected to snap infrared images of galaxies formed just 100 million years after the Big Bang.