Window Seat on Forever

Credit: NASA & ESA

This image will take you a while to explore and digest. Within this deep panorama from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, 12 bil­lion years of cos­mic his­tory plays out with thou­sands of galax­ies shown in var­i­ous stages of development.

Explore the image. Hint: The but­ton on the bot­tom right will take the zoom into full-screen mode. The scene con­tains grace­ful, mature spi­rals, ellip­ti­cal galax­ies as well as older, far­ther and fainter irreg­u­lar shaped galax­ies. These galax­ies are con­sid­ered the build­ing blocks for the galax­ies we see today. More than 7,500 galax­ies make up this image. Light from some of the closer galax­ies in the image took a bil­lion years to reach our eyes and tele­scopes here on Earth. Can you the faint red specks in the image? Those galax­ies were some of the first ones formed in the early uni­verse about 13 bil­lion years ago.