The famous Hubble deep field of galaxies as seen here in the infrared at a wavelength of 3.6 microns. The new SEDS project that has observed this region has also studied many other deep extragalactic fields, covering a total area nearly six times that of the full moon. Credit: NASA/Spitzer and M. Ashby

At some stage after its birth in the big bang, the universe began to make galaxies. No one knows exactly when, or how, this occurred. For that matter, astronomers do not know how the lineages of our own Milky Way galaxy and its stars trace back to those first galaxies and their first stars, but astronomers have been working hard to find out. The Hubble Space Telescope announced in 1996 that it had stared at apparently dark sky for ten days at optical wavelengths, long enough to acquire a picture of the very distant universe. The resultant image, the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), reveals galaxies that are so far away that they existed when the universe was less than about 5% of its present age of 14 billion years. Since 1996 astronomers have been working to understand exactly what kinds of galaxies these remote objects are, and whether they bear any resemblance to our own Milky Way galaxy, either as it is now, or as it was when it was younger….
… Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-distant-cosmos-infrared.html#jCp