Credit: Photo: NASA, ESA, the GOODS Team, and M. Giavalisco
(Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst); Science: NASA, ESA, and H. Atek and J.-P. Kneib (EPFL, Switzerland)
GOODS Field Containing Distant Dwarf Galaxies Forming Stars at an Incredible Rate (Annotated).
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 in the red circles) that resided in the early universe, between 2
billion 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).