Galaxies 'Birthed' Stars Shortly After Big Bang: New Telescope Reveals Unprecedented Detail

It turns out that galaxies may have started "birthing" stars far sooner than scientists once believed. A new study led by Joaquin Vieira, a scholar at Caltech, shows that galaxies began creating stars shortly after the Big Bang, which sparked the beginning of our universe.

The findings were discovered by an international team of astronomers that observed galaxies with the National Science Foundation-funded South Pole Telescope (SPT). In addition, they employed the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope which allowed scientists to examine distant galaxies with an unprecedented amount of detail. With these tools, the researchers identified high-redshift galaxies--essentially, very old galaxies. The telescope itself was designed to examine the Big Bang's afterglow, also known as the cosmic microwave background, and is sensitive enough to identify interesting and ancient galaxies based on only their color.

The astronomers eventually found two galaxies with a redshift of six, which made them two of the oldest galaxies ever discovered. In addition, they also measured two redshifts at 5.7, which is the highest known measurement for any galaxy discovered at this time. It places both of them within the first billion years of the universe's life.

Yet what is perhaps more fascinating is the fact that astronomers could actually detect these galaxies. At 12 billion light-years away, these galaxies allowed scientists to see into the past--a feat which couldn't have been accomplished without the new ALMA radio telescope. Previous images of these distant galaxies only appeared as fuzzy blobs in space.

So what does this mean for birthing stars? Since these galaxies are so old, their star formation also began early.

"It just tells us earlier in the history of the universe, there might have been very large scale galaxy formation and star formation that might have happened earlier than we thought," said Yashar Hezaveh, who led one of the new studies and co-authored the others, in an interview with CBC News.

Now, the researchers hope to find out why these ancient galaxies formed stars so rapidly--at a rate of about 4,000 per year. In comparison, the Milky Way galaxy only births about one star per year.

The current findings are published in Nature with two more upcoming articles to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.