By Ron Cowen
Youthful versions of massive galaxies like our Milky Way may be only a cosmic stone’s throw away. That’s the finding of an ultraviolet-detecting satellite that has identified 36 such galaxies.
Since 1995, astronomers have detected more than 2,000 baby galaxies, virtually all of which reside more than 10 billion light-years away and therefore hail from the distant past (SN: 2/7/98, p. 92). These remote galaxies, aflame with newborn stars, have garnered attention because they’re the suspected building blocks of large, mature galaxies such as the Milky Way. But their distant locations make the building blocks difficult to study.