Astronaut repairmen had hardly finished tightening the last stubborn bolts on the Hubble Space Telescope last summer when astronomers set the controls on the refurbished telescope to the dim and distant past. The result was a new long-distance observing record. Astronomers announced in a series of papers over the fall and in a news conference last week that Hubble had recorded images of the earliest and most distant galaxies ever seen, blurry specks of light that burned brightly only 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang.

The specks are clouds only one-twentieth the size of the Milky Way galaxy and only 1 percent of its mass, and seem to show the lingering effects of the first generation of stars to form in the universe in that they get bluer the farther back you go in time. The new galaxies, along with other recent discoveries like the violent supernova explosion of a star only 620 million years after the Big Bang, take astronomers deep into a period of cosmic history known as the dark ages, which has been little explored. It was then that stars and galaxies were starting to light up vigorously in larger and larger numbers and that a fog of hydrogen that had enveloped space after the Big Bang fires had cooled mysteriously dissipated.

Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology, one of many astronomers who have been working with the observations, said, “We’re reaching the beginning where galaxies formed for the first time.” The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, cosmologists agree, meaning that the light from these galaxies has been on its way to us for 13 billion years.

Statements 1 through 10 (circle + if the statement is true, - if it is false)

1. Last summer, the Hubble was renovated in space by astronauts.

2. The Hubble is a microscope that looks deep into space and sends back images to Earth.

3. The images recently taken with the Hubble recorded galaxies 600-800 million years after the Big Bang.

4. The images taken by Hubble are the farthest images ever recorded from Earth.

5. The age astronomers call the “cosmic age” has been little explored until now.

6. The images Hubble sent back to Earth consisted of specks of clouds and light.

7. The clouds documented by Hubble are one-twentieth the size of the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way.

8. Richard Ellis believes that astronomers are seeing back to the beginning where galaxies formed for the first time.

9. The light from Hubble’s images is believed to be 13 billion years old.

10. It is believed by many cosmologists that the universe is less than 13 billion years old.
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