A slow, graceful zoom moving deeper into the nighttime sky descends on an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Nicknamed the "Spiderweb Galaxy," MRC 1138-262 shows dozens of star-forming satellite galaxies as individual clumpy features in the process of merging. This galaxy, which is 10.6 billion light-years away, shows the universe's formative years, only 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Kornmesser (ESA)

Publication: October 12, 2006