January 15, 1996
A birthday is what happens when cosmic time briefly puts down the scale of eons and pays attention to a single human year.
The Dawn of the Clusters
Birthday · January 15, 1996
A little universe, just for you
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APOD published January 15, 1996. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What did the universe look like near the beginning? This exciting photo by the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the deepest ever taken, and shows galaxies as far away as ever before photographed. The universe back then - when only one third of its present age - was a strange and violent place. Back then a large fraction of galaxies were colliding and interacting. In fact, the shapes of many galaxies in the above photo are more distorted than most nearby galaxies. At this early universe epoch many clusters of galaxies were just forming. The bright twisted group of galaxies below the photographs center contains the energetic radio galaxy 3C324.