Dwarf Galaxies 9 billion light-years away in near infrared. Image courtesy NASA/ESA
The mighty eye of Hubble has been turned toward the genesis of galaxies and stars and found great big things start out in smaller, dynamic packages. Today the baryonic universe is dominated by elegant spirals like our own Milky Way and massive elliptical galaxies buzzing like a swarm of angry bees in ultra slow-motion. Each with supermassive black holes lurking in their center, some weighing over a billion times the mass of our sun. But Hubble has found it wasn’t always like that:
(HST) — These newly discovered dwarf galaxies are around a hundred times smaller than the Milky Way. Their star formation rates are extremely high, even for the young Universe, when most galaxies were forming stars at higher rates than they are today. They have turned up in the Hubble images because the radiation from young, hot stars has caused the oxygen in the gas surrounding them to light up like a fluorescent sign.
Space is amazing.
Can’t wait untill we get that new satelite telescope thing up.
What’s even more amazinf Xeon, is this entire universe was created so that a magic invisible sky wizard could rule a single species on one planet in absentia. You know, give us advice on what to eat, how long beards should be, who should put their what in where, and by some accounts to disguise itself as human and fake its own death to save us from its own ruthless nature.
You just made me imagine an alternate ending to “2001” where David Bowman simply exclaims, “OMG! WTF!”