Astronomers have assembled one of the most comprehensive portraits yet of the universe’s evolutionary history. It’s based on a broad spectrum of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and other space and ground-based telescopes. In particular, Hubble’s ultraviolet vision has been used to track the birth of stars over the last 11 billion years, going all the way back to the cosmos’ busiest star-forming period about 3 billion years after the big bang. This composite image encompasses a sea of around 15,000 galaxies widely distributed in time and space. About 12,000 of them are undergoing star formation. This mosaic is 14 times the area of the Hubble Ultra Violet Ultra Deep Field released in 2014. Right click on the image to embiggen it.

Image Credits: NASA / ESA / P. Oesch (University of Geneva) / M. Montes (University of New South Wales)