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Erica Hupp/George Deutsch
Headquarters, Washington
(Phone: 202/358-1237/1324)

Gay Hill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
(Phone: 818/354-0344)

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore
(Phone: 410/338-4514)

September 27, 2005
RELEASE : 05-286
NASA Finds "Big Baby" Galaxies in Newborn Universe


"This galaxy, named HUDF-JD2, appears to have bulked up quickly, within the first few hundred million years after the big bang. It made about eight times more mass in stars than are found in our own Milky Way, and then, just as suddenly, it stopped forming new stars," said Bahram Mobasher of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, and the European Space Agency, Paris.

The galaxy was pinpointed among approximately 10,000 others in a small patch of sky called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF). The galaxy is believed to be about as far away as the most distant known galaxies. It represents an era when the universe was only 800 million years old. That is about five percent of the universe's age of 14 billion years.


Hubble's optical-light UDF image is the deepest image ever taken, yet this galaxy was not evident. This indicates much of the galaxy's optical light has been absorbed by traveling billions of light-years through intervening hydrogen gas. The galaxy was detected using Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer. It was also detected by an infrared camera on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory. At those longer infrared wavelengths, it is very faint and red.


Spitzer observations were also independently reported by Laurence Eyles from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and Haojing Yan of the Spitzer Science Center, Pasadena, Calif. They also revealed evidence for mature stars in more ordinary, less massive galaxies at similar distances, when the universe was less than one billion years old.


Mobasher's team estimated the distance to this galaxy by combining information provided by the Hubble, Spitzer, and VLT observations. The relative brightness of the galaxy at different wavelengths is influenced by the expanding universe and allows astronomers to estimate its distance. They can also get an idea of the make-up of the galaxy in terms of the mass and age of its stars.


For electronic images and information from the research on the Web, visit:


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