Credit: NASA, ESA, P. van Dokkum (Yale University), M. Franx (Leiden University, The Netherlands), and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz, and Lick Observatory)
These images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show nine compact, ultradense galaxies as they appeared 11 billion years ago. The galaxies are only 5,000 light-years across and yet are 200 billion times more massive than the Sun. They are a fraction of the size of today's grownup galaxies but contain the same number of stars. Each galaxy could fit inside the central hub of our Milky Way Galaxy. Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer snapped these images between June 2006 and June 2007.