In an effort to learn what distant galaxies might look like, and therefore glimpse what was going on in the early universe, astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to study 37 nearby galaxies. Images of three of those galaxies were released yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego.

See the first new Hubble image

Distant galaxies -- those billions of light-years away -- often appear strangely shaped. But scientists aren't sure what they really look like, because when light travels such long distances, it gets distorted. Visible light is stretched into the infrared spectrum, and ultraviolet light is stretched into the visible.

Learning more about the formation and structure of ancient galaxies would help scientists better understand the evolution of the universe in general.

Preliminary results of the study, in which galaxies were viewed in visible and ultraviolet light, indicate that faraway galaxies may not all be as oddly shaped as researchers had suspected.