A dramatic new picture of young, distant galaxies in deep space has been revealed.
The European Space Agency and Nasa produced the images of some of the more distant galaxies in our sky with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.
The image contains the deepest image ever taken of a galaxy cluster, and four unusually bright galaxies that could teach us more about how our own Milky Way formed.
Above: This long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image of massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (foreground) is the deepest ever made of any cluster of galaxies. It shows some of the faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected in space.
The brightest galaxy in the picture shows stars forming 50 times as fast as they do in our corner of the universe. While the galaxy is 20 times as small as the Milky Way, it contains more than 1 billion stars.
Some of the galaxies in the picture appear as they were 13 billion years ago, as the light has taken almost the entire lifetime of the universe to reach the Earth.
"These just stuck out like a sore thumb because they are far brighter than we anticipated," said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
"There are strange things happening regardless of what these sources are. We're suddenly seeing luminous, massive galaxies quickly build up at such an early time. This was quite unexpected."
Nasa hopes that we will be able to look even further back into the universe's past once the James Webb Space Telescope, currently being developed, is finally launched.