Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA.
It is time that astronomers are trying to figure out exactly how the universe has evolved from its origins in its history 13.4 billion years ago, during the Big Bang, the universe of galaxies and star systems that we know and where we find ourselves today. Out of all the open questions, the way galaxies form and evolve is the subject of a heated debate . Now a group of researchers seem to unravel the tangle: using the work product of the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of people who have offered volunteer for the project Galaxy Zoo ( See MediaINAF ), scientists at Oxford University have concluded that galaxies are stabilized in their present form about 10 million years ago . That is 2 billion years earlier than previously thought.
The research team led by Brooke Simmons , Oxford University, said the discovery in a paper just published in the Monthly Notices Royal Astronomical Society .
The scientists asked the volunteers to help Galaxy Zoo, an interesting experiment in collaborative science from the bottom, and left them the task to classify as tens of thousands of galaxies , pictured from the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope. It is generally of very distant objects, and that they show us how they appeared 10 billion years ago, when the universe was still a ‘puppy’ to 3 billion years old – less than a quarter of its present age.
What is surprising is that these galaxies as soon as classified by the Friends of the Zoo, are surprisingly similar to those we see today in our immediate cosmic neighborhood, the ‘ current universe, discs and bars and spiral arms, all of which we know well.
According to the theory the process of galaxy formation, as we know, it should have ended before 8 billion years ago. Here, we are 2 billion years in advance on the forecasts. Everything seems to have settled earlier than expected.
“When we began to rummage among these galaxies – says Brooke Simmons – we had no idea of what really we could find. We knew that according to the models and simulations of galaxies we should not find any of the characteristics that we can observe in the nearby Universe: galaxies barred, spiral, evolved. Galaxies are so young had to be still too rough to have completed a training process. “
” Now we know that is not so. With a titanic work, and we have a clearer picture of the collective of many thousands of distant galaxies. And the process of galaxy formation is obviously faster than we ever imagined. “
Source: Media INAF | Written by David Coero Borga
