Press Releases

9 March 2004: Astronomers today unveiled the deepest portrait of the visible Universe ever achieved by humankind. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the million-second-long exposure reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called "dark ages", the time shortly after the big bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dark Universe. The new image should offer new insights into what types of objects reheated the Universe long ago.

15 February 2004: An international team of astronomers may have set a new record in discovering what is the most distant known galaxy in the Universe. Located an estimated 13 billion light-years away, the object is being viewed at a time only 750 million years after the big bang, when the Universe was barely 5 percent of its current age.

17 July 2003: Using the powerful trick of gravitational lensing, a European and American team of astronomers have constructed an extensive 'mass map' of one of the most massive structures in our Universe. They believe that it will lead to a better understanding of how such systems assembled and the key role of dark matter.

5 December 2001: Astronomers have observed a Dark Matter object directly for the first time. Images and spectra of a MACHO microlens - a nearby dwarf star that gravitationally focuses light from a star in another galaxy - were taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The result is a strong confirmation of the theory that a large fraction of Dark Matter exists as small, faint stars in galaxies such as our Milky Way.

5 October 2001: A very small, faint galaxy - possibly one of the long sought `building blocks' of present-day galaxies - has been discovered by a collaboration between the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Telescopes at a tremendous distance of 13.4 billion light-years (based on the estimate of 14 billion years as the age of the Universe). The discovery was made possible by examining small areas of sky viewed through massive intervening clusters of galaxies. These act as a powerful gravitational lens, magnifying distant objects and allowing scientists to probe how galaxies assemble at very early times. This has profound implications for our understanding of how and when the first stars and galaxies formed in the Universe.

27 June 2001: Piercing the heart of a globular star cluster with its needle-sharp vision, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered tantalising clues to what could potentially be a strange and unexpected population of wandering, planet-sized objects.

6 September 2000: The ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope has made the first detailed optical observations of an example of a remarkable class of galaxies by using the additional magnifying power of a huge galaxy cluster to extend its range. The galaxy, named J1/J2, belongs to a remote population of galaxies. Although extremely luminous, the galaxies are obscured by enormous quantities of dust - the smoky residue of the life cycle of massive stars - and have so far only been seen by sub-millimetre telescopes. The Hubble observation has enabled astronomers to investigate the connection between this distant population of 'hidden' dust-enshrouded, intensely star-forming galaxies and the less dusty galaxies that are readily observed with optical telescopes.

24 January 2000: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, as made dramatically evident in stunning new celestial pictures of remote galaxies and a colourful dying star released today.