Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team

This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just about 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2006/news-2006-12

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

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