This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a variety of galaxies with irregular and peculiar shapes. These galaxies are so far away that they are seen when the universe was a fraction of its current age. The bright blue regions indicate a rapid episode of star formation. Hubble reveals that these objects once far outnumbered large galaxies like our Milky Way, but have faded or self-destructed by today.

This image is part of a serendipitous sky survey which has been conducted over the past three years by Professor Richard Griffiths and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, with a team of astronomers in the United States and Britain.

The survey is one of the key projects for Hubble. Over the past three years the deep survey has uncovered a bizarre variety of shapes and structures in distant galaxies, which previously appeared as fuzzy blobs from ground-based telescopes.

Credit: Richard Griffiths (JHU), The Medium Deep Survey Team, and NASA