Australian scientists find galaxy thought to be extinct

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, could improve science's understanding of how galaxies and stars form.

Australia's Swinburne University astronomy student Andy Green, his supervisor Professor Karl Glazebrook and their colleagues, made the discovery using two telescopes at the Siding Springs observatory in New South Wales of Australia.

Green said these galaxies are strange, lumpy and ancient looking.

"Similar primordial galaxies have been seen in Hubble Deep Field images looking back 13 billion years through space-time to when the universe was very young," Green told ABC News on Thursday.

"We didn't think these sort of galaxies still existed, certainly not just a billion light years away."

According to Australia Associated Press, the galaxies are similar to our own Milky Way, in their spiral disc-like shape, yet are in the process of forming far more stars, around 100 per year compared to just one per year in our galaxy.

These galaxies are also far more physically unstable than our own relatively quiet neighborhood.

They are found around one billion light years from earth. Although this means the observed events occurred one billion years in the past, they are considered recent for the 14 billion-year- old universe.

Green used two telescopes at Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran to observe nearby star-forming galaxies, of which 11 were found to be as turbulent as the ancient ones.

The research on these rare galaxies suggested that when stars are born the energy released creates turmoil in the gas around them.

"The problem now is that these galaxies we have observed are in the modern universe where we don't expect that primordial gas to be available anymore as most of it should have already been swept up into other galaxies," Green told Australia Associated Press.

Green said the discovery has raised some big questions: Where is the gas that makes these stars coming from?

"That suggests maybe this theory is still accurate for galaxies in the early universe or maybe we need to rethink it altogether as we don't think it can be valid for the galaxies we see today," Green said. Kazinform cites Xinhua. See www.xinhuanet.com for full version.