Hubbel's CANDELS survey identified the appearances of faraway galaxies over 80 percent of the universe's history.
Galaxies are classified using what is known as the "Hubble Sequence," the researchers found the sequence was relevant as far back as 11 billion years ago, a Hubble press release reported.
The sequence organizes the galaxies into a "cosmic zoo of spiral, elliptical, and irregular shapes with whirling arms, fuzzy haloes and bright central bulges
The researchers identified three types of galaxies: elliptical, spiral, and lenticular.
"This is a key question: when and over what timescale did the Hubble Sequence form?" BoMee Lee, of the University of Massachusetts, said. "To do this you need to peer at distant galaxies and compare them to their closer relatives, to see if they too can be described in the same way."
The researchers used Hubble to peer billions of years back in time, and found the Hubble Sequence goes back 2.5 billion years longer than was previously believed.
"This is the only comprehensive study to date of the visual appearance of the large, massive galaxies that existed so far back in time," co-author Arjen van der Wel of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said. "The galaxies look remarkably mature, which is not predicted by galaxy formation models to be the case that early on in the history of the Universe."
The earlier galaxies were mostly blue and star-forming or red and barren.
Dense galaxies like the Milky Way are rarer in terms of the early universe, which has made describing similar galaxies' characteristics difficult.
"The huge CANDELS dataset was a great resource for us to use in order to consistently study ancient galaxies in the early Universe," Lee said. "And the resolution and sensitivity of Hubble's WFC3 is second to none in the infrared wavelengths needed to carry out this study. The Hubble Sequence underpins a lot of what we know about how galaxies form and evolve - finding it to be in place this far back is a significant discovery."
