Infant Galaxies Merging Near ‘Cosmic Dawn’

(Source NASA) This composite color image of a giant primordial bubble of gas, dubbed Himiko (after the queen of ancient Japan), is assembled from Hubble, Subaru, and Spitzer data. The left panel shows the field around Himiko, as viewed by Hubble. The position of Himiko is marked with a square.

The right panels show close-up views of the Hubble image (top) and a combination of Hubble, Subaru, and Spitzer images (bottom). In the Hubble image, infrared wavelengths captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 at 0.98, 1.25, and 1.6 microns are represented by blue, green, and red, respectively. In the Hubble/Subaru/Spitzer image, the combination of three Hubble infrared bands is green, while Lyman-alpha emission captured by Subaru Suprime-Cam and infrared 3.6 micron taken by the Spitzer Infrared Array Camera are presented with blue and red, respectively.

Credit: NASA, ESA, ESO, NRAO, NAOJ, JAO, M. Ouchi (University of Tokyo), R. Ellis (California Institute of Technology), Y. Ono (University of Tokyo), K. Nakanishi (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) and Joint ALMA Observatory), K. Kohno and R. Momose (University of Tokyo), Y. Kurono (Joint ALMA Observatory), M. Ashby (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), K. Shimasaku (University of Tokyo), S. Willner and G. Fazio (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Y. Tamura (University of Tokyo), and D. Iono (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)