Spitzer and Hubble team up to find "Big Baby" galaxy in the newborn Universe [ACS image]

This image demonstrates how data from two space observatories, the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes, are used to identify one of the most distant galaxies ever seen. This galaxy is unusually massive for its youthful age of 800 million years. (After the Big Bang, the Milky Way by comparison, is approximately 13 billion years old.)

The galaxy, named HUDF-JD2, was pinpointed among approximately 10,000 others in a small area of sky called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). This is the deepest images of the universe ever made at optical and near-infrared wavelengths.