Deepest Ultraviolet Image Shows a Sea of Distant Galaxies

A Pool of Distant Galaxies. Credit: ESO

Dive right in to this image that contains a sea of distant galaxies! The Very LargeTelescope has obtained the deepest ground-based image in the ultraviolet band, and here, you can see this patch of the sky is almost completely covered by galaxies, each one, like our own Milky Way galaxy, and home of hundreds of billions of stars. A few notable things about this image: galaxies were detected that are a billion times fainter than the unaided eye can see, and also in colors not directly observable by the human eye. In this image, a large number of new galaxies were discovered that are so far away that they are seen as they were when the Universe was only 2 billion years old! 

This image contains more than 27 million pixels and is the result of 55 hours of observation, made primarily with the Visible Multi Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) instrument. To get the full glory of this image, here's where you can download the full resolution version. It's worth the wait while it downloads. Or click here to be able to zoom around the image.