Some galaxies may have "grown up" faster than others.
Researchers discovered 16 galaxies a staggering 12 billion light-years away; meaning they existed and were fully mature when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old, a Carnegie Institution news release reported.
Researchers are working to uncover how these galaxies reached maturity so quickly.
Young galaxies form stars, when they stop producing these heavenly bodies it is a sign they have reached full maturity; the universe is full of these adult galaxies.
In the universe's early days galaxies were growing by consuming gas and creating stars, meaning there should have been very few galaxies that were able to reach full maturity.
The research team used "deep images at near-infrared wavelengths" to look for red galaxies in the outer reaches (or early days of) the universe. A red color would indicate older stars with no new ones being born.
These far-off galaxies are extremely hard to spot in visual wavelengths but these near-infrared light images make them much more detectable.
These mature galaxies have masses similar to our own Milky Way, which is still forming stores very slowly.
"The newly discovered galaxies must have formed very rapidly in roughly 1 billion years, with explosive rates of star-formation. The rate of star formation must have been several hundred times larger than observed in the Milky Way today," the news release reported.
The researchers hope to determine how these galaxies formed so rapidly and what caused them to stop forming stars when they did.
"The galaxies were discovered after 40 nights of observing with the FourStar camera on the Magellan Baade Telescope at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and combined with data from Hubble's Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey. Using special filters to produce images that are sensitive to narrow slices of the near-infrared spectrum, the team was able to measure accurate distances to thousands of distant galaxies at a time, providing a 3-D map of the early universe," the news release reported.
