The oldest galaxies in the universe, never before seen by any previous land or space observatories, show the power of the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope using the Wide Field Camera 3 installed by the space shuttle STS-125 astronaut crew in May.

This Hubble image staring 13.1 billion years back in time has captured galaxies as they existed only 600 million years after the Big Bang. Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 added to the observatory in May took the image. Credit: NASA/ESA/Space Telescope Science Institute

Virtually every point of light in the image (above) is a galaxy. Thousands of galaxies, each with billions of stars (and also probably billions of planets) are visible in a very small section of the sky -- smaller than a postage stamp held at arm's length.

Virtually everything in this picture existed billions of years before the formation of our solar system just 4.67 billion years ago -- 8 billion years after many of the objects here were formed and eventually died. As such, many of the objects imaged here no longer exist.

The image is also the highest resolution infrared picture of deep space ever taken. The faintest objects are about one-billionth as bright as can be seen with the naked eye.

The image shows objects further back in time than have ever been seen, just 5% into the 13.5 billion year existence of the universe and a mere 300 million years after enough photons had been created for the existence of even light itself.

Space Telescope Science Institute researchers believe it is one of the most amazing images of space ever taken. The image shows how the fourth and final shuttle servicing mission to the famed observatory boosted its capabilities to the highest they have ever been since its launch in 1990. The camera was installed during the first of five EVAs done by the Atlantis STS-125 crew to upgrade Hubble.

The Infrared Ultra Deep Field galaxy photo was taken with the new Infrared Wide Field Camera 3 in August 2009 during a total of four days of pointing for 173,000 seconds of total exposure time. The ability of Hubble, orbit after orbit, to use its guide star capabilities to lock onto the exact same spot it imaged on previous orbits is what make such observations possible.

The infrared image was taken in the same region of space as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which was taken in 2004. That was the deepest visible-light image of the universe, but the infrared image shows far more.

That is because Hubble's newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 collects light from near-infrared wavelengths and therefore looks even deeper into the universe than the visible wavelength, because the light from very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe.

This image was taken by a multi-university team, which was awarded the time for the observation and made it available for research by astronomers worldwide. In just three months, 12 scientific papers have already been submitted using these new data.

Infrared light is invisible and therefore does not have colors that can be perceived by the human eye. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium and long near-infrared wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; red, 1.6 microns). The representation is "natural" in that blue objects look blue and red objects look red.

These Hubble observations are also trailblazing a path for Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will look even farther into the universe than Hubble at infrared wavelengths. The JWST is planned to be launched in 2014.