Space Tornadoes, Baby Stars, and Ancient Galaxies

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Each point of light in this field represents a whole galaxy, formed when the universe was young. Spitzer's IRAC camera has seen galaxies formed only seven hundred million years after the Big Bang, according to Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The mini-tadpole shaped galaxy at the upper right is only hundreds of millions of light-years away so the shape can be discerned. The light from the distant galaxies, which appear as dots, is seen as it was over ten billion years ago, when the universe was young.