Going, going, gone? Candidate z~7-8 galaxies, seen to "drop out" in the z filter around 1 micron (adapted from Oesch et al., 2009)

Quick on the heels of NASA’s showcasing of the first images taken by a reborn Hubble Space Telescope come a pair of papers posted to astro-ph showing a glimpse of Hubble’s potential new power. These papers, by a collaboration of US, Swiss and Dutch astronomers, report the detection of galaxies using Hubble’s new optical/infrared camera WFC3 out to staggeringly high redshifts of 8-9. If confirmed, this shows that Hubble can now detect radiation from galaxies when the Universe was just a few hundred million years old. The first anything at those distances was spotted just a few months ago, when satellite SWIFT caught a gamma-ray burst that was confirmed to have erupted at redshift of 8.2.

[Read more...]