A Flight Through the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey Field

  • Released Friday, April 26, 2019
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This visualization traverses the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey (UDS) field to showcase the varied appearances of galaxies and their three-dimensional distribution. The sequence features a dense cluster of galaxies about 6 billion light-years away and extends to galaxies at more than twice that distance. Because the light from these galaxies has travelled for billions of years across space, the images show the galaxies as they appeared billions of years ago. In addition, the expansion of space has redshifted the light of these galaxies toward longer wavelengths (i.e., to the red end of the visible-light region and into the infrared-light region). The changes seen in galaxies during the fly-through illustrate the changes in galaxy structure and appearance over billions of years of cosmic history.

CANDELS is an acronym for the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey project. One of the largest projects ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope, CANDELS surveyed five fields to study the development of galaxies over time. The CANDELS observations of the UDS field complement ground-based observations from the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope.

Astronomers and visual artists extracted over 26,000 galaxies from the Hubble UDS images and created a computer model based on the measured and estimated properties. Note that the distances used in the visualization are significantly compressed for cinematic purposes.

Explore galaxies within the CANDELS UDS field as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

For More Information

See http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2011-31

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA, ESA, F. Summers, J. DePasquale, G. Bacon, and Z. Levay (STScI)
Acknowledgement: H. Ferguson, A. Koekemoer, and the CANDELS Team

This page was originally published on Friday, April 26, 2019.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at 12:41 AM EST.

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Datasets used in this visualization

  • Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) [Hubble Space Telescope: WFC3 and ACS]

    ID: 1034
    Type: Observed Data Sensor: WFC3 and ACS

    CANDELS, the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey, is the largest project in the history of the Hubble Space Telescope, with 902 assigned orbits (about two months) of observing time. It was carried out between 2010 and 2013 with two cameras on board Hubble – WFC3 and AC

    See all pages that use this dataset

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.