GOODS North Field

Thousands of galaxies stretching across billions of light-years of space are visible in this deep field image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The image covers a portion of a large galaxy census called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS). The GOODS North field revealed an infant galaxy named GN-z11, seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past. Because it takes time for light to travel across the vastness of space, astronomers saw the galaxy as it existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only three percent of its current age. Spectroscopic observations found that the galaxy is even farther away than originally thought, and existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the time when scientists believe the very first stars started to form.