The early universe may have been filled with six times as many galaxies as previously thought, suggest new observations. The finding could put new constraints on cosmological models but is being contested by astronomers who have used other methods to survey the cosmos shortly after the big bang.
Astronomers led by Olivier Le Fèvre at the University of Provence in Marseille, France, used a powerful spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to measure the distances to 10,000 objects above a particular apparent brightness. They found 970 galaxies at distances of between 9 billion and 12 billion light years - corresponding to a period just a few billion years after the big bang.
The result is between 2 and 6 times as many galaxies as previous surveys have turned up, says Le Fèvre. "That means the universe was manufacturing stars at a much higher rate than thought," he ...
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