Hubble closes in on Big Bang

BALTIMORE -- The Hubble Space Telescope has now seen to within "a stone's throw" of the Big Bang itself, astronomers said Tuesday.

Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute unveiled an image they said was the deepest telescopic view into the universe ever obtained.

Among the roughly 10,000 new galaxies revealed by a million-second-long exposure of a small patch of dark sky in the constellation Fornax are several dozen faint reddish spots that could be infant galaxies just emerging from the "dark ages" that prevailed in the first half-billion years after the Big Bang, when stars had not yet had time to form, the astronomers said.

"We might have seen the end of the beginning," said Anton Koekenoer of the institute. He and others cautioned, however, that more work would be required before astronomers know if their surmises are correct.

Tuesday's look at the universe will not be superseded until the James Webb Space Telescope goes into orbit in 2011. When the new image, known officially as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, has been analyzed, said Steven Beckwith, the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, "we expect it to reveal new secrets to the origin of stars and galaxies, and ultimately ourselves."

On Tuesday, the institute simultaneously unveiled the images and made the raw data available to the world at www.hubblesite.org.