ASTRONOMY:
Looking South to the Early Universe
Donald Goldsmith
When the Hubble Space Telescope was aimed at a small patch of northern sky for 10 days in 1995, astronomers believed that they had captured a typical sliver of the distant universe. At the beginning of October, they followed up on the original Hubble Deep Field with a 10-day exposure of a nondescript patch of sky near the South Pole--and found similar swarms of faint galaxies, some of them among the most distant and earliest ever seen. The new view is more than just a reprise of the first: Instruments installed on the orbiting telescope since 1995 have enabled it to harvest far more detail this time around.