Faint Compact Galaxy in the Early Universe

This is a Hubble Space Telescope view of a very massive cluster of galaxies, MACS J0416.1-2403, located roughly 4 billion light-years away and weighing as much as a million billion suns. The cluster's immense gravitational field magnifies the image of galaxies far behind it, in a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

The inset is an image of an extremely faint and distant galaxy that existed only 400 million years after the big bang. Hubble captured it because the gravitational lens makes the galaxy appear 20 times brighter than normal. The object is comparable in size to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a diminutive satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. It is rapidly making stars at a rate ten times faster than the LMC. The object might be the growing core of what was to eventually evolve into a full-sized galaxy. The research team has nicknamed the object Tayna, which means "first-born" in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America.

About the colours

This image is a composite of separate exposures acquired by the WFC3/IR and ACS/WFC instruments. Several filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: F435W (I) + F606W (R) Green: F814W (I) + WFC3/IR F105W (Y) Red: F125W (J) + F140W (JH) + F160W (H)

About the data

MACS J0416-2403, MACS J0416.1-2403 is part of the Frontier Fields Program. These data were observed via the HST proposals: 13496 : J. Lotz (STScI) et al.; 12459 : M. Postman (STScI) et al. Supplemental data were obtained by proposal 13386 , PI: S. Rodney (JHU) et al.

The science team comprises: L. Infante (Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile), W. Zheng (JHU), N. Laporte and P. Troncoso (Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile), A. Molino (University of São Paulo, Brazil/Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia/CSIC, Spain), J. Diego (University of Cantabria, Spain), F. Bauer (Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, Chile/Space Science Institute, Boulder), A. Zitrin (Caltech), J. Moustakas (Siena College, NY), X. Huang (University of Science and Technology of China), X. Shu (Anhui Normal University, China), D. Bina (IRAP/CNRS Toulouse, France), G. Brammer (STScI), T. Broadhurst (University of Basque Country/IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Spain), H. Ford (JHU), and S. Garcia and S. Kim (Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile).