ABSTRACT

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is the deepest image ever taken of the universe. It contains over 10,000 galaxies in an area 200"x200" with the most distant confirmed object at a redshift of 6.7 corresponding to a time when the universe was only about 700 million years old. The main science driver was to look for the edge of the epoch of reionization, a topic of debate that will be the centerpiece of this talk. There are a variety of novel research areas enabled by the UDF including the study of host galaxies of high redshift AGN, search for very distant supernovae, search for distant Kuiper Belt Objects, the search for the earliest elliptical galaxies, and a search for variable sources, some of which will be touched on in this lecture.