This photo is a look back in time 13 billion years

Several years ago, scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of an infant galaxy as it appeared 13.4 billion years ago. How did they achieve this head-spinning look so far back in time? The light they measured to create the photo was emitted by the galaxy, named GN-z11, just 400 million years after the universe began and has taken this long to reach Hubble in orbit around Earth. Video explanation above.

It's amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon," explained investigator Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, at the time of the 2016 discovery.

More from NASA in this video: