Portal:Physics/Selected picture/Week 51, 2006

This high resolution image of the HUDF includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, are some of the most distant galaxies to have been imaged by an optical telescope, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, or HUDF, is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 3, 2003 through January 16, 2004. It is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light, looking back in time more than 13 billion years. The HUDF contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies.