Hubble telescope captures earliest images of universe - when it was just a 'baby' at 600 million years



The Hubble telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe - just 600 million years after the Big Bang.



It is the most complete picture taken in near-infrared light of the early universe, showing the first infant star clusters.



To give some perspective, the light left these galaxies 8billion years before our own Sun and Earth had even formed.

Scientists released the 'baby pictures' at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.



Deep space time: the Hubble picture shows the earliest ever seen galaxies which are circled in the boxes in the inset images on the left

Professor Garth Illingworth from the University of California: 'These young galaxies haven't yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and quite blue in colour.



'That's mostly because at this stage, they don't contain many heavy metals. We're seeing very small galaxies that are seeds of the great galaxies today. '

Ivo Labbe from the Carnegie Institute of Washington said: 'The results show that these galaxies at 700 million years after the Big Bang must have started forming stars hundreds of millions of years earlier, pushing back the time of the earliest star formation in the Universe.'

Scientists are hoping the data will help them work out how neutral gas that filled the early universe was ionised, which is the state most cosmic gas is in today. Ionisation is a process where electrons are stripped from their atoms like in plasma screens.

Hubble has been key in helping determine the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years, ending a long scientific debate around 10 years ago.

But as far back as Hubble can see, it still does not see the first galaxies. For that, NASA will have to rely on a new observatory, the $4.5 billion James Webb telescope, which is set to launch in 2014.



'We are on the way to the beginning,' said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History. 'Every step closer to the beginning tells you something you did not know before.'



The new Hubble picture captures those distant simpler galaxies juxtaposed with closer ones that are newer and more evolved.



The result is a cosmic family photo that portrays galaxies at different ages and stages of development over the course of more than 13 billion years.

