Extreme Astronomy

Galaxies of all shapes and sizes shine through the darkness in the Extreme Deep Field (XDF), an image from Hubble Space Telescope that combines 10 years of Hubble images of a patch of sky that is smaller than the full Moon. This view, which covers a portion of the constellation Fornax, the furnace, was compiled from more than 2,000 individual images, which represent a total of more than three weeks of observations. The most distant galaxies in the image are about 13.2 billion light-years away, which means we see them as they looked when the universe was just 500 million years old. [NASA/ESA/G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz)/R. Bouwens (Leiden University)/HUDF09 Team]