 | | This vibrant image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope released by NASA August 31, 2006, shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way galaxy.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo) |
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UK scientists find 27 proto-galaxies similar to the Milky Way for the first time, which provide further evidence that galaxies like the Milky Way were created by the clumping of smaller clouds of gas and dust, media reported Wednesday.
The small proto-galaxies discovered are extremely distant and date from a time when the universe was only two billion years old.
Billions of years ago the universe was filled by an extremely thin and almost uniform gas, which then started to clump together to form faint proto-galaxies, scientists believe.
Over the eons, these components came together -- through mergers or collisions -- to form fully fledged galaxies.
"We think that galaxies build up by the merging of smaller lumps. We had seen already the lumps that form bigger galaxies but this is the first time we have seen lumps that are small enough to amalgamate into something like our galaxy," said Martin Haehnelt of Cambridge University.
Source: Xinhua/agencies
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