Astronomers discovered mega galaxies that were created by the Universe in its early days.
During its initial days, the Universe was somewhat like a star making machine and created many galaxies. A team of astronomers discovered a light coming towards Earth using a brand-new telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert. Reportedly, the beam of light had taken over 12 thousand million years to reach the Earth.
It was discovered that the light was coming from massive galaxies in the distant cosmos which produced a thousand stars per year where as the Earth's Milky Way produces just one star per year.
Astrophysicists have for a very long time wondered how the Earth developed after the "Big Bang" theory. Owing to this curiosity they discovered starburst galaxies, which convert vast collection of cosmic gas and dust into stars at a very fast rate.
This new discovery and the study of 18 ancient galaxies have led scientists to conclude that the making of stars existed when the Universe was less than two billion years old, which is a whole billion years earlier than thought.
"The more distant the galaxy, the further back in time one is looking, so by measuring their distances we can piece together a timeline of how vigorously the universe was making new stars at different stages of its 13.7-billion-year history," said Joaquin Vieira of the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech.
Astronomers report that the older and more distant the star, the redder it is. With the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a collaboration between Europe, North America, Japan and Taiwan, they were able to get images of the star clusters and their redshift fingerprint. Redshift is used to measure galactic distance.
This new light, which was magnified by the gravitational force of galaxies in the foreground, helped astronomers find double the number of known starburst galaxies with a high redshift of more than four.
The study was published in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal.
