Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), broke the distance limit for galaxies
On January 5, 2010, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope's new infrared camera, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), broke the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe. This makes Hubble a powerful “time machine” that allows astronomers to see the most distant galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago, just 600 million to 800 million years from the Big Bang. The existence of these newly found galaxies push back the time when galaxies began to form. The deep observations also demonstrates the progressive build up of galaxies and provides further support for the hierarchical model of galaxy assembly where small objects accrete mass, or merge, to form bigger objects over a smooth and steady but dramatic process of collision and agglomeration. This is analogous to streams merging into tributaries and then into a bay. Hubble Space Telescope is an Astrophysics Division mission.