Astronomers have glimpsed the most distant galaxy ever detected — a lone object 13.2 billion light years from Earth. The discovery implies that the fledgling Universe was emptier than was previously imagined.
It's almost as if a blueprint was unfolding, but no ... Actually, it would be interesting of some design-oriented and non-design-oriented astronomers made sealed predictions abut this stuff and see who is closer to the mark.
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The near-barrenness of this epoch stands in contrast to a period roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang, in which the team has found around 60 galaxies.
The results suggest that in fewer than 200 million years — a cosmic blink of an eye — large galaxies rapidly built up from smaller ones, and the rate of star formation increased tenfold. "It's telling us that there is a very dramatic change taking place at this time period," says Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a co-author of the paper.
The sparseness of galaxies raises a mystery.
