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Credit & Copyright: S. Pascarell, R. Windhorst and S. Odewahn
(Arizona State U.),
W. Keel (U. Alabama),
HST
Explanation:
Snips and snails and puppy dog tails, is that what galaxies were
made of? In a
report
released yesterday and soon to be published in
Nature,
astronomers have imaged an interesting
distant patch of sky
with the orbiting
Hubble Space Telescope.
They found many merging groups of
stars and
gas which have been
dubbed "pre-galactic blobs." A particularly dense bunch of
these small blue merging objects
are visible in the above picture. This may be a snapshot of
galaxies actually being formed!
Although peculiar by present standards of
galaxies,
these blobs may have been normal in the distant past, many billions of
years ago. This adds evidence that
galaxies
formed from the
conglomeration of smaller objects instead of the
fragmentation of larger objects.
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A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day