GOODS Field Containing Distant Dwarf Galaxies Forming Stars at an Incredible Rate

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 that resided in the early universe, between 2 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).

About the data

The image was created from Hubble data from the following proposals: 9425 and 9583 PI: M. Giavalisco (University of Massachusetts, Amherst).

The science team comprises: H. Atek and J.-P. Kneib (EPFL, Switzerland), C. Pacifici (Yonsei University Observatory, Republic of Korea), M. Malkan (UCLA), S. Charlot (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris), J. Lee (STScI), A. Bedregal (Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics), A. Bunker (University of Oxford, UK), J. Colbert (Spitzer Science Center), A. Dressler (Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science), N. Hathi (Aix Marseille University, France), M. Lehnert (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, France), C. Martin (UC Santa Barbara), P. McCarthy (Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science), M. Rafelski (Spitzer Science Center), N. Ross (UCLA), B. Siana (UC Riverside), and H. Teplitz (Caltech).