Explosion Of Galaxy Growth In The Early Universe April Flowers
for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new study from the
University of California, Berkeley indicates that the birth of
the first massive galaxies that lit up the early universe was an
explosive event, happening faster and ending sooner than
suspected. Around 13 billion years ago, when the universe was
about 750 million years old, extremely bright, active galaxies
formed and fully illuminated the universe, according to Oliver
Zahn, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Center for
Cosmological Physics (BCCP) at the University of California,
Berkeley, who led the data analysis. This new data, from the
South Pole Telescope, provides new constraints on the universe’s
first era of galaxy formation, called the Epoch of Reionization.
Early stars came to life in massive gas clouds, generating the
first galaxies, so most astronomers think. The energetic light
pumped out by these stars is thought to have ionized the
hydrogen gas in and around the galaxi