June 19, 2003: Two of NASA's Great Observatories, bolstered by
the largest ground-based telescopes around the world, are
beginning to harvest new clues to the origin and evolution of
the universe's largest building blocks, the galaxies. It's a bit
like finding a family scrapbook containing snapshots that
capture the lives of family members from infancy through
adolescence to adulthood. The Hubble Space Telescope has joined
forces with the Chandra X-ray Observatory to survey a relatively
broad swath of sky encompassing tens of thousands of galaxies
stretching far back in time. Called the Great Observatories
Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), astronomers are studying galaxy
formation and evolution over a wide range of distances and
ages.See the rest: In preliminary results soon to be published,
Hubble astronomers report that the sizes of galaxies clearly
increase continuously from when the universe was about 1 billion
to 6 billion years old. (Many astronomers believe that the
universe is about 13.7 billion years old.