ATLANTA, Jan 8: The newest camera on the Hubble Space Telescope has created an unprecedented image of a huge hunk of the sky, including at least 10,000 galaxies, which could help determine how our own Milky Way evolved, astronomers said on Thursday.

The new mosaic is the largest colour image ever made by the orbiting telescope, covering an area of the sky about the apparent size of the full moon. This may not sound big, but it is 150 times the size of images made by an earlier survey of galaxies known as the Hubble Deep Field image.

In this case, the size of the picture is important, because narrow, if deep, images of the cosmos can give a misleading impression of what is out there. "Galaxies are incredibly diverse creatures," Shardha Jogee, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said at a news briefing. "You really need a large sample, otherwise your results get skewed."

The new image, created with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, is a patchwork of 63 squares showing the area around the constellation Fornax (The Laboratory Furnace) in the southern hemisphere.

Looking closely with high resolution, scientists found detailed pictures of some 10,000 galaxies, and expect there are thousands of other, fainter galaxies in the same field of view.

Presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta, this research by an international group of scientists is meant to study how galaxies form. This is particularly important for those studying the Milky Way galaxy, which contains Earth, Jogee said.

'VIOLENT RELAXATION': Because earthly observers are sitting within the Milky Way, their vantage point is better for galaxies outside our own, which can be glimpsed in their entirety.