By Ron Cowen
Astronomers have unveiled a picture of the distant universe that ranks as the sharpest and most detailed ever recorded. A faint, red body in that image, taken with a camera that astronauts installed on the Hubble Space Telescope 2 months ago (SN: 3/16/02, p. 163: Telescope Tuned Up: Back to work for orbiting observatory), could be one of the most remote galaxies known, researchers reported April 30 at a NASA press briefing in Washington, D.C.
The new detector, known as the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), outperforms Hubble’s workhorse–the wide-field and planetary camera 2 (WFPC-2). ACS has twice the field of view as the still-operating WFPC-2 and can detect celestial objects one-fifth as bright and half as large, says ACS lead scientist Holland Ford of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.