"Starbursts" in dwarf galaxies could have played a larger role in star-formation than researchers previously believed.
These starburst galaxies form stars at furious rate and could help scientists better-understand the history of the universe, a Hubble news release reported.
Galaxies across the universe are still forming new stars, but most were created between two and six billion years ago following the Big Bang.
Data from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) has allowed researchers to get a step closer to gaining a better understanding of this crucial star formation period by looking at dwarf galaxies from the early universe. The team focused on a cluster of starbursts within the sample.
In the past these small galaxies could only be observed from afar, but WFC3 has allowed the researchers to get a closer look.
"We already suspected that dwarf starbursting galaxies would contribute to the early wave of star formation, but this is the first time we've been able to measure the effect they actually had," Hakim Atek of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, lead author of the new paper, said in the news release. "They appear to have had a surprisingly significant role to play during the epoch where the Universe formed most of its stars."
"These galaxies are forming stars so quickly that they could actually double their entire mass of stars in only 150 million years - this sort of gain in stellar mass would take most normal galaxies [one to three] billion years," co-author Jean-Paul Kneib, also of EPFL, said in the news release.
The results could help researchers better-understand the link between a galaxies' mass and its star-forming activity; leading to a better understanding of the early universe.
In the future scientists hope to uncover what causes the starbursts' "violent outbursts" of star formation, the news release reported.
