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Spiral Galaxy

A cigar-shaped spiral galaxy is seen colliding with a smaller galaxy (seen in blue) in this deep-field portrait of a tiny fraction of the sky. The image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope during a four-month period in 2003-04, reveals distant galaxies too faint to be seen by ground-based telescopes or even in Hubble's previous faraway looks. Some galaxies in this photo were created less than one billion years after the formation of the universe.

Photograph courtesy NASA/ESA/S. Beckwith (STScI)/HUDF Team