Imagine picking up a tiny baby and finding that he’s as heavy as a full-grown adult. A group of astronomers found themselves in a similar situation recently when they observed nine galaxies that hail from a time when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was less than 3 billion years old. Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea revealed that the galaxies, already known to be surprisingly massive, were small, measuring only about 5,000 light-years across — one-twentieth the diameter of the Milky Way.
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