Space agencies are seeing further than ever before and it allows us humans to gather valuable knowledge about the beginnings of the universe. The picture by the Hubble Telescope was assembled utilizing Hubble Telescope views over a decade.
The universe is estimated to have a 13.7 billion-year lifespan and the galaxies in the XDF photo go back as much as 13.2 billion years. The Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 were used by Hubble to generate this image. Astronomers are now able to examine the universe by seeing into the depths of space and time.
This has given a lot of insights. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and has been a monumental success. It is anticipated to continue to provide images for us till the year 2018. NASA has already made plans to launch a more advanced telescope to replace Hubble. The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to provide more insights into the beginnings of the universe and will reveal galaxies that were there when the universe was only a couple of hundred million years old.
Going back to the question of finding life, one thing that I have always believed is the possibility that extra-terrestrials were the cause of life on this planet. There is research that supports this theory and the process is known as lithopanspermia. Astrobiology is a field worth looking into for all you young astronomers, biologists and chemists out there and it was the astrobiology journal that contained this piece by some of the experts.