U.S. astronomers get image of earliest galaxies' formation

Astronomers at the University of California, Irvine got a more focused image of the formation of the earliest galaxies 500 million years after the Big Bang, according to a doctoral student's paper published in the journal Nature Communications Tuesday.

Ketron Mitchell-Wynne was the lead author of the paper with help of other astronomers from Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute.

The study used about 10 years of data from the Hubble Space Telescope to create "one mosaic image of the sky." Scientists then removed all of the stars and galaxies. Using statistics with the new image, they were able to get a better image of the fainter galaxies from the universe's earliest days, Mitchell-Wynne said.

In essence, the scientists were taking a look back in time to the "epoch of reionization," a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The most significant finding from the new data was that there are early galaxies that are "much more different" than the familiar ones such as the Milky Way.

"They're progenitors of our whole environment," Mitchell-Wynne said.

"The questions a lot of people have are, 'Where do we come from and how did we get here?' Observing these first galaxies plays a big role in answering those questions," he said.

The astronomers are excited about how the new data will help them get a better picture of what they're seeing when they launch the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018. The telescope will provide greater resolution with its images.

"It could be possible that we'll see those galaxies individually," Mitchell-Wynne said. Endi