This is the Hubble Deep Field-South, an exposure taken over ten days in
October, 1998.
Click on image for full size
Hubble Space Telescope image courtesy of STScI
Hubble Heads South for the Winter
News story originally written on November 23, 1998
Scientists now have a compliment to the
Hubble Deep Field--it's
the Hubble Deep Field-South. The HDF-S is a 10-day-long exposure of a
piece of the southern hemisphere sky taken in October 1998.
"We have eagerly awaited this new set of images ever since the first HDF,
which had a dramatic impact on the entire science of astronomy," said STScI
astronomer Robert Williams. "Hubble's deep field views revealed a large,
heretofore unseen fraction of the universe and opened it up to
interpretation and understanding."
The Hubble Space Telescope looked at a section of of the constellation
Tucana to create the HDF-S. The original HDF was taken from a section of
space near the
Big Dipper. Scientists also wanted the HDF-S to look at a
distant
quasar to gather more
information than they had through the HDF.
The two cosmic "core samples" appear to support the theory that the
universe is uniform (on a large scale) regardless of the direction you
look. If scientists tried to map the entire sky using the technique they
used to get the two deep fields, it would take 900,000 years.
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