Day 8 of the 2012 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). The newest candidate for Most Distant Galaxy Yet Known. This newly discovered galaxy is very young and only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way. The object is observed 420 million years after the big bang, when the universe was 3 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years. The inset shows a close-up of the young dwarf galaxy. This is the latest discovery from a large program that uses massive clusters of galaxies as natural zoom lenses to reveal distant galaxies in the early universe. Called the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH), the program allows astronomers to use the gravity of massive galaxy clusters to magnify distant galaxies behind them, an effect called gravitational lensing. (NASA, ESA, M. Postman and D. Coe (STScI), and the CLASH Team)
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