When Galaxies Settled Down in the Early Universe Two Billion Years Earlier Than Expected

Astronomers may have learned a little bit more about the evolution of our universe. Scientists have found that galaxies may have settled into their current form about two billion years earlier than previously expected.

Finding this out wasn't a simple task. A huge team of volunteers from the Galaxy Zoo project classified the shapes of tens of thousands of galaxies recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope. These galaxies are actually so far away that they appear as they were more than 10 billion years ago, which is when the universe itself was only about three billion years old; that's less than a quarter of its present age.

The newly classified galaxies actually look a lot like those in today's universe. They possess disks, bars and spiral arms. While in theory these features should have taken another two billion years to begin to form, it seems that they appeared far earlier than expected.

"When we started looking for these galaxies, we didn't really know what we'd find," said Brooke Simmons, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We had predictions from galaxy simulations that we shouldn't find any of the barred features that we see in nearby, evolved galaxies, because very young galaxies might be too agitated for them to form. But we now know that isn't the case. With the public helping us search through many thousands of images of distant galaxies, we discovered that some galaxies settle very early on in the universe."

The findings reveal a bit more about galaxy formation in the early universe. Not only that, but it shows how the universe evolved over time, and reveals that things may have "settled" far earlier than expected.

The findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.