page_title: Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
section_title: Hubble eXtreme Deep Field
hierarchical_section_title: Hubble Ultra-Deep Field / Hubble eXtreme Deep Field
caption_attribution_description: English: Hubble Extreme Deep Field (full resolution) released by NASA on September 25th, 2012.
context_page_description: The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, containing an estimated 10,000 galaxies. The original release was combined from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003, through to January 16, 2004. Looking back approximately 13 billion years it has been used to search for galaxies that existed at that time. The HUDF image was taken in a section of the sky with a low density of bright stars in the near-field, allowing much better viewing of dimmer, more distant objects. In August and September 2009, the HUDF field was observed at longer wavelengths using the infrared channel of the recently attached Wide Field Camera 3 instrument. When combined with existing HUDF data, astronomers were able to identify a new list of potentially very distant galaxies.
  Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the rectangular image is 2.4 arcminutes to an edge, or 3.4 arcminutes diagonally.
context_section_description: The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (HXDF), released on September 25, 2012, is an image of a portion of space in the center of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. Representing a total of two million seconds (approximately 23 days) of exposure time collected over 10 years, the image covers an area of 2.3 arcminutes by 2 arcminutes, or approximately 80% of the area of the HUDF. This represents approximately one thirty-two millionth of the sky.
  The HXDF contains approximately 5,500 galaxies, the oldest of which are seen as they were 13.2 billion years ago. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. The red galaxies in the image are the remnants of galaxies after major collisions during their elderly years. Many of the smaller galaxies in the image are very young galaxies that eventually developed into major galaxies, similar to the Milky Way and other galaxies in our galactic neighborhood.
caption: Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (HXDF) taken in 2012
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