Birth of Galaxy Believed Found by Researchers

Scientists believe they have observed a galaxy in the earliest stages of its life 12 billion years ago, when it was creating stars at the “extraordinarily high” rate of several each day.

Using tools that were not available even two years ago, the scientists focused on a source of radio waves 12 billion light-years away in an effort to watch the birth of a galaxy. Since it has taken 12 billion years for the light to reach Earth, they are looking backward in time, watching the event as it occurred when the universe was very young.

By using radio waves to pinpoint the location of the galaxy, the scientists focused optical telescopes on the object. The galaxy is so distant and so faint that the light it emits would be equivalent to the light received on the Earth from a 25-watt light bulb on the moon, but it may have been sufficient to tell the astronomers much about the early universe.

The scientists, who presented their preliminary findings Monday before the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, said the galaxy was producing stars at the rate of “a few thousand solar masses a year,” meaning that stars equivalent to the mass of the sun were being produced at the rate of a few thousand every year.

That rate was described as “extraordinarily high” by Patrick McCarthy, an astronomy graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the team, led by Hyron Spinrad, professor of astronomy at Berkeley.

By contrast, the Milky Way, which is the Earth’s galaxy, produces only about one new star in an entire year.

Although they admitted they could be wrong, the scientists said they believe they have for the first time observed the birth of a galaxy, about three-fourths of the distance to the edge of the universe.

“People have searched for decades,” McCarthy said in a press conference. Extremely sensitive electronic light detectors that have revolutionized astronomy in recent years made the discovery possible, he said.

“We couldn’t have done it two years ago,” he said.

If the scientists are right, their discovery suggests that the birth of the universe was a more gradual process than had been thought because older galaxies have been discovered much farther out in space.

S. George Djorgovski, a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a member of the team, said it has long been thought that all galaxies were formed at about the same time during a relatively brief period--on the astronomical time scale--of about 200 million years.

Continuing to Form

If the object announced Monday, known only as radio source 3C 326.1, is in fact a galaxy, “then galaxies continued to form over a couple of billion years,” Djorgovski said.

The object is vastly different from galaxies closer to Earth in that its major constituent is a massive cloud of electrically charged hydrogen gas that radiates light 100 times brighter than the galaxy’s stars. The fact that the gas is much brighter than the stars led the scientists to conclude that the galaxy had yet to form the bulk of its stars.

Since it had already formed more than 100 billion stars, the infant galaxy was destined to become three to five times bigger than the Milky Way.

But since it has taken 12 billion years for the birth announcement to reach Earth, scientists will have to wait a long time to confirm that the rest of the stars did, in fact, light up the distant sky billions of years ago.

The other members of the team are Michael Strauss and Wil Van Breugel of UC Berkeley, and James Liebert, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.