Tiny (but ultra bright) quartet of ancient galaxies takes astronomers by surprise

Combining the power of two major NASA space telescopes, astronomers have found four young, exceptionally bright galaxies rich in emerging stars at a time when the universe was only 500 million years old. The tiny galaxies - captured early in the universe's formation - are about 10 to 20 times more luminous than anything previously seen and about one-twentieth the size of the Milky Way, Earth's more mature home galaxy. In the brightest of the galaxies, stars are forming about 50 times faster than they now are in the Milky Way. "We were surprised and delighted to find them," said Pascal Oesch, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and first author of the related research paper. "This means that galaxies were growing faster in the early universe than we had previously thought." Results were presented Jan. 7 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC. Pieter van Dokkum, chair of Yale's astronomy department, and Ivelina Momcheva, a Yale postdoctoral fellow, were also part of the team.