Astronomers Assemble the Most Detailed Picture of the Universe Ever

by Joel Hruska

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Hubble astronomers have assembled the largest, most complete image of the universe ever recorded, by stitching together data gathered by multiple telescopes over years of observations.

Back in 1995, astronomers created the first attempt at imaging the deep universe by having Hubble “stare” at an empty patch of sky for one million seconds. The resulting image, the Hubble Deep Field, became one of the most popular space photographs ever taken. It’s the feature image for this article. But the HDF was an extremely small photo. It focused on approximately one 24-millionth of the sky. Later surveys, including the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, and eXtreme Deep Field, built on this initial imaging with additional telescopes, or examined a different area of the sky in greater detail (the original HDF imagined an area of space within Ursa Major, while the UDF and XDF both focused on an area of space in the constellation Fornax). New cameras added to the Hubble after 1995 were also used in…