French Astronomers Find Signs of a Galaxy’s Birth
From Times staff and wire reports
French astronomers say they may have found traces of the birth of one of the first galaxies. The team used sensitive telescopes that measure changes in radiation over huge distances in both space and time to find the early galaxy.
Patrick Petitjean of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris-CNRS and colleagues report in the April 4 issue of Nature that they analyzed light from the area around a quasar, known as BR1202-0725, and found it was strongly red-shifted, indicating that it is receding from the Earth at a very high speed. “This suggests that we are witnessing the first stages in the buildup of a galaxy-sized structure,” they wrote.
