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© NASA/ESA/PAThe new Hubble image showing galaxies more distant than any seen before

Images of some of the most distant galaxies in the Universe have been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The galaxies, identified by British astronomers, date back to when the Universe was in its infancy - less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

The astronomers say that the 35 galaxies are probably the oldest ever observed.

The measurements were made using the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), an infrared telescope that was installed during the most recent Space Shuttle servicing mission in May.

Light from very distant galaxies is "stretched out" as it travels through space, making it appear redder.

"Having a new camera on Hubble, which is very sensitive in the infrared means we can identify galaxies at much greater distances than was previously possible," Stephen Wilkins, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, said.

Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, with wavelengths about twice as long as visible light - beyond the red.

The observations, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, focused on a region of sky known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which the astronomers first analysed five years ago using visible light images taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The latest images allowed the teams from Oxford and Edinburgh to peer back to when the first galaxies were being formed. Analysing the chemical signatures of the earliest galaxies and surrounding space can provide information about their formation.

The very distant galaxies will be studied in more detail by Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be launched in 2014.