NASA’s telescope - Galaxy Evolution Explorer - has discovered at least three dozen baby galaxies that are believed to be in existence since the last 10 billion years.
The search puts to rest the astronomers belief that only small new galaxies were being formed by the aging universe. The discoveries could be made possible as Galaxy Evolution Explorer has sensitive ultraviolet light detectors, and young stars emit mostly ultraviolet wavelengths. It also has a specially designed 20-inch-diameter telescope with a view four times as big as a full moon.
The baby galaxies appear as bluish blobs of light about 10,000 light-years across in images sent back by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer satellite, which was launched in 2003 on a 29-month mission to survey the sky for ultraviolet emissions.
The new babies are only the first results of the project, and the astronomers said they expected to find more, although not many.
While they are not nearly the size of mature galaxies like the Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light-years across and has about 200 billion stars, the newborn galaxies outshine them in ultraviolet by a factor of 100 or so, which means they are producing stars at a much faster rate, said astronomers.
Studying these new galaxies could give cosmologists insights into the processes by which galaxies and stars first formed out of clouds of primordial gas and dust at the beginning of time.
The closest of the galaxies is about a billion light-years from Earth. One light-year is 9.5 trillion kilometers, the distance light travels in a year in a vacuum.
Scientists till now have discovered 36 galaxies using the Galaxy Evolution Explorer.
