The amazing limit of the Hubble Space Telescope

GlobalPost

It's called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF. The above photo is a composite of 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photos.

NASA notes the XDF image has about 5,500 galaxies in it. And according to the space agency, "The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see."

The New York Times offers and interesting fact: Some of the galaxies light "has been on the way to us for 13.2 billion years. More distant (and earlier) galaxies cannot be seen because their light is shifted into infrared wavelengths that are invisible to Hubble."

According to Space.com, Hubble was only able to  campute the image by amassing light in 2,000 images of the same area, with a total exposure time of 2 million seconds, through two of its cameras.

It's the farthest the Hubble Telescope has ever seen. Hubble is expected to continue its journey and record information through 2018, according to NASA.

Check out this video from NASA's website.

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