"Hubble Has Found the Ancient Galaxies That Gave the Universe Its First Light"

Via Reddit: A new technique that removes the light of foreground galaxy clusters is giving astronomers a direct look at a generation of galaxies dating back to the universe's baby years.

The discovery is considered a key piece of evidence for a critical, but poorly understood period of time when the universe switched from being dark to radiating light.

This week, University of Texas astronomer Rachael Livermore and colleagues describe a successful hunt thanks to a new technique that combines deep-field Hubble Space Telescope images with what is known as "wavelet decomposition" — a light-masking equivalent of noise-canceling headphones — to computationally remove light from foreground galaxy clusters.

T"The wavelet transform allows us to decompose an image into its components on different physical scales. Thus, we can isolate structures on large scales… and remove them, allowing objects on smaller scales to be identified more easily," the scientists wrote in a draft of their upcoming paper, published on arXiv.org.

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