Nowadays, technology has evolved and we can find out every detail about our past. We can see what lead to the creation of Universe and even some Galaxy formations form the beginning of time. Modern means showed scientists that, in early history, luminous clusters were present in our galaxies.
Shortly after Big Bang, many stars started to form and galaxies begun to cluster together. The whole process took place in millions of years, but now telescopes have shown us how it happened.
Recently, astronomers spotted the light coming from two clusters with individual galaxies. Observations have detected that the clusters have the same shape and features as those which are 1.5 billion years old, so this might their actual age.
The little sparks were noticed through the South Pole Telescope from Antarctica and the Herschel Space Observatory. The latter is a spacecraft no longer used that now orbits somewhere at the distance of 1 million miles from Earth. Top of Form
Seen through the telescoped, clusters looked like some fireflies in the darkness, so astronomers needed to look closer. They went to the Chilean desert and used two ground-based telescopes for a more thorough reserach. Bottom of Form
Thanks to the observations, scientists could see the whole picture a lot clearer – they discovered 10 glowing galaxies in a cluster and 14 in another one. The findings were recently published in science journals like ”Nature” and ”The Astrophysical Journal”.
Astronomers think that their discovery is surprising; it shows how such tiny light particles as the photons crossed the Universe in billions of years until they reached the Earth. The finding also proves that such young clusters don’t take that much time to form in the Universe, like astronomers initially thought.
However, a mystery still remains – why did these baby clusters get this big in such a short time. Astronomers still have a lot of work to do for finding out how and when each galaxy was born. For that, they get a lot of support from modern, top-notch telescopes that make their job a lot easier.
As our second lead editor, Anna C. Mackinno provides guidance on the stories Great Lakes Ledger reporters cover. She has been instrumental in making sure the content on the site is clear and accurate for our readers. If you see a particularly clever title, you can likely thank Anna. Anna received a BA and and MA from Fordham University.