The Hubble Space Telescope – great piece of equipment, no doubt about it. It has fantastic visual capabilities, and even has near-infrared functionality that allows astronomers to study star formation far into the depths of the universe. Still, it was lacking in certain areas, namely the region between 5 and 10 billion light-years away from us, when most of the stars in the universe were born. Because the hottest, most massive and youngest stars emit light in ultraviolet, they weren’t able to provide much data. Until now, that is. Astronomers have added ultraviolet data to the Hubble Ultra Deep Field using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, and the results are amazing.

This capability gives astronomers an unprecedented look at star and galaxy formation, including our own Milky Way galaxy. They can now tell which galaxies are forming stars, and (more importantly) where those stars are forming. This new wavelength is instructive in teaching scientists how galaxies form from small star clusters into the massive entities we typically picture them as.

The image is massive in terms of both scope and depth. It was made from 841 orbits of telescope viewing time and includes some 10,000 galaxies. This also means that the light received by the Hubble extends back to within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang.

A space-based telescope like Hubble is currently the only existing telescope capable of registering UV light from outer space – land-based telescopes are hindered by the tendency of Earth’s atmosphere to block incoming UV light. The next telescope with these capabilities will likely be the  James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).