US astronomers have unveiled mankind’s deepest look into the early universe, providing a tableau of 10,000 galaxies, including some of the first to be forged after the Big Bang 13 billion years ago. The astonishing million-second-long exposure by the orbiting Hubble telescope provides a glimpse into the end of the so-called Dark Ages, when the first stars began to emerge from the primal blast. ‘‘Hubble takes us to within a stone’s throw of the Big Bang itself,’’ said Massimo Stiavelli of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) in Baltimore, Maryland, and head of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) project. The image captured a crazy array of galaxies in various sizes and colours and shaped rather like toothpicks or links of a bracelet. These ‘‘oddball’’ galaxies compare starkly with the sweeping spiral and elliptical galaxies with which skygazers are familiar today, the STSI said in a statement. The telescope’s previous peeks into faraway space, the Hubble Deep Fields (HDFs), were in 1995 and 1998. They recorded objects that were born within a billion years of the Big Bang. Technology has now deepened and sharpened the view, and some of the galaxies presented at the STSI yesterday may have emerged as early as 400 million years after the Bang.
