Hubble has imaged the most distant galaxies yet, but to see the first galaxies, astronomers need to go even deeper.

By Jonathan P. Gardner

IN MAY 2009, astronauts installed two new cameras in the Hubble Space Telescope, making Hubble more powerful than ever. The new Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) increases Hubble's sensitivity and field of view at near-infrared wavelengths, improving its ability to search for distant galaxies by as much as a factor of 20.

It didn't take long for WFC3 to make its mark. Garth Illingworth, Rychard Bouwens (both at the University of California, Santa Cruz), and their colleagues recently used WFC3 to find 5 galaxies that are more distant than any seen before, pushing our knowledge of galaxy evolution back to just 600 million years after the Big Bang (a redshift of about 8.5).

Read the rest of this article in the February/March issue of Australian Sky & Telescope.