Credit: NASA, ESA, the GOODS Team, and M. Giavalisco (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Science NASA, ESA, and H. Atek and J.-P. Kneib (EPFL, Switzerland)

This image shows a region of space containing a sample of dwarf galaxies studied by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Hiding among these thousands of galaxies are faint dwarf galaxies (marked by the red circles) that resided in the early universe, between 2 and 6 billion years after the big bang, an important time period when most of the stars in the universe were formed. Some of these galaxies are undergoing a ferociously fast rate of star formation called"starbursts." Astronomers are striving to deduce the galaxies' contribution to star formation in this crucial era of the universe's history. The image is part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS).

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2014/news-2014-25

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: http://hubblesite.org/copyright/