Massive Galaxies Discovered in Our Early Universe: The Birth of Monsters

Scientists are learning a bit more about our universe with the help of some ancient galaxies. New discoveries are giving astronomers a way to test theories of galaxy formation and evolution.

In this latest study, a team of astronomers have taken a look at many distant galaxies that escaped earlier observations. More specifically, the researchers used images from the UltraVISTA survey, which is one of six projects using VISTA to survey the sky at near-infrared wavelengths. The scientists actually made a census of the faint galaxies when the age of the universe was between just .75 and 2.1 billion years old.

UltraVISTA has been imaging the same patch of sky, nearly four times the size of a full moon, since December 2009. This is the largest patch of sky imaged to these depths at infrared wavelengths. The scientists combined these UltraVISTA observations with those form the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, which probes the cosmos at even longer, mid-infrared wavelengths. In all, the researchers uncovered 574 new massive galaxies, which is the largest sample of hidden galaxies in the early universe ever assembled.

"We found no evidence of these massive galaxies earlier than around one billion years after the Big Bang, so we're confident that this is when the first massive galaxies must have formed," said Henry Joy McCracken, co-author of the new study, in a news release.

The findings reveal a bit more about massive galaxies in our universe. More specifically, they show a bit more about the evolution of galaxies, and when massive galaxies first began to appear.

The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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