Gravity. It's the law.

This Is the Most Detailed Image of the Universe Ever Captured

NASA has just published the most detailed view of the Universe ever taken. It’s called the Extreme Deep Field—or XDF for short. It took ten years of Hubble Space Telescope photographs to make it and it shows some the oldest galaxies ever observed by humans, going 13.2 billion years back in time.

It’s a mindblowing, extremely humbling view. Not only for what it shows, but for what it doesn’t show. While this image contains about 5,500 galaxies, it only displays a tiny part of the sky, a ridiculously small slice of the Universe. As you can see in the image below (make sure to expand it to see it complete), the photo only focus on a small area of the constellation Fornax.

This illustration compares the angular size of the XDF field to the angular size of the full moon. A finger held at arm’s length would appear to be about twice the width of the moon in this image.

This graphic shows (click to expand) the foreground (galaxies less than 5 billion light years away from us), background (between 5 and 9 billion years ago) and very far background galaxies (more than 9 billion years), which are “one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

Click Here to download the full image (13mb TIFF image)