Galaxy Cluster Abell 2744 from Hubble

This long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image of the massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744 is the deepest ever made of any cluster of galaxies. The observation shows some of the faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected in space.

Abell 2744, located in the constellation Sculptor, appears in the foreground of this image. It contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago. The immense gravity in Abell 2744 acts as a gravitational lens to warp space and brighten and magnify images of nearly 3,000 distant background galaxies.

The more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the big bang. This image is part of an unprecedented long-distance view of the universe from an ambitious collaborative project among the NASA Great Observatories called The Frontier Fields. Over several years, the project observed select patches of the sky for the purpose of better understanding galaxy evolution.

See http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2014-01