Check out this ultra-spectacular ultraviolet Hubble view of thousands of distant galaxies

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured this region of about 5,000 galaxies located billions of light-years away. In this image, thousands of galaxies can be seen shining in ultraviolet light (blue), in addition to visible and near-infrared light observed previously.

This region captured by Hubble covers 9 square arcminutes - equivalent of about one percent the size of the full moon in the sky. This is the largest ultraviolet Hubble survey of distant galaxies to date. The results of this survey were presented at the 240th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Pasadena on June 14.

"Ultraviolet light comes from the most massive stars, which are also the youngest and hottest of stars, and it provides a unique insight into ongoing star formation in galaxies both near and far," said Xin Wang, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech's IPAC, an astronomy center.

Led by Harry Teplitz, a staff scientist at IPAC, Wang and his colleagues used Hubble to survey ultraviolet light coming from distant galaxies in a collection of different patches of sky known collectively as CANDELS, for Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey.

The new program, called UVCANDELS, imaged about 140,000 galaxies and amounted to about 10 days of Hubble time. The images may help reveal how the first stars ended the universe's dark ages.

"We can't see the extreme ultraviolet light coming from the first galaxies because those photons are absorbed before they reach us. We look instead at very similar, or analogous, galaxies that are not quite as far away to try to understand the physical conditions that enabled the first galaxies to cause reionization," said Teplitz.

Take in this ultra-spectacular ultraviolet view!This Hubble image unveils thousands of galaxies shining in ultraviolet light, in addition to visible and near-infrared.Learn more about the largest ultraviolet Hubble survey of distant galaxies to date: https://t.co/ixwfaFE0FZ pic.twitter.com/Ob7qKeHAD4

— Hubble (@NASAHubble) June 16, 2022