Teenage Galaxies Found

I still remember an astronomy class I took during my first year of graduate school in the early 1990s. Two classmates and I undertook a project to search for protogalaxies—giant gas and star clouds in the process of collapsing to form galaxies. Conceptually, the search was simple: put the appropriate filter on the telescope/detector, pick a dark region of the sky, and observe that region for an adequate amount of time. Of course, the practical outworking of the search proved more difficult. Suffice to say, we did not detect any protogalaxies.

Over fifteen years later, a Science Daily article reports that astronomers have recently detected protogalaxies “billions of light-years away.” The discovery provides one more piece of evidence in support of astronomers’ explanation for how the universe began and developed. Additionally, this evidence continues to illuminate a high degree of fine-tuning (like what I discussed a couple of weeks ago) in order for the right kind of universe to form the right type of galaxy, star, planet, and moon in order to support advanced life like human beings.