Discovery of 3 Dozen Galaxies May Reveal Livelier Universe

The universe may not be the decrepit cosmic retiree that many scientists have imagined.

New research has uncovered a previously unknown galactic incubator only a few billion light-years from the Milky Way.

“We knew there were really massive young galaxies eons ago, but we thought they had all matured into older ones more like our Milky Way,” said Chris Martin, a Caltech physicist who co-authored the study. “If these galaxies are indeed newly formed, then that implies parts of the universe are still hotbeds of galaxy birth.”

Scientists believe that when the universe was young, massive galaxies were regularly bursting into existence. Our Milky Way galaxy, for instance, is about 10 billion years old. As the universe aged, fewer and fewer large galaxies formed.

The three dozen giant galaxies found by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer space telescope, however, are believed to be 100 million to 1 billion years old.

“We thought this type of galaxy had gone extinct, but in fact newborn galaxies are alive and well in the universe,” said Tim Heckman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. That could place the death of the universe, when all the stars go dark, many billions of years into the future.

The newly discovered galaxies are of a type called ultraviolet luminous galaxies, since most of the light emitted by young stars are in the ultraviolet range. Highly sensitive ultraviolet light detectors were installed on the telescope to hunt for these kinds of youthful galaxies.

The telescope was launched into space in April 2003. It is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.