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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Earliest galaxies found 'on our cosmic doorstep' [bbc.com]

Some of the earliest galaxies to form in the Universe are sitting on our cosmic doorstep, according to a study. These faint objects close to the Milky Way could be more than 13 billion years old, researchers from the universities of Durham and Harvard explain. They formed upwards of a hundred million years after the Big Bang and contained some of the first stars to light up the cosmos. The findings are published in the Astrophysical Journal.

[...] Prof Carlos Frenk, from Durham University [dur.ac.uk], UK, said: "Finding some of the very first galaxies that formed in our Universe orbiting in the Milky Way's own backyard is the astronomical equivalent of finding the remains of the first humans that inhabited the Earth. It is hugely exciting."

Lead author Dr Sownak Bose, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics [harvard.edu] in Cambridge, US, told BBC News: "For some of these tiny satellites, maybe 50% or even 90% of their mass was assembled at a time when the Universe was less than one billion years old."

Separately: Hubble Paints Picture of the Evolving Universe [nasa.gov]

Astronomers using the ultraviolet vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have captured one of the largest panoramic views of the fire and fury of star birth in the distant universe. The field features approximately 15,000 galaxies, about 12,000 of which are forming stars. Hubble's ultraviolet vision opens a new window on the evolving universe, tracking the birth of stars over the last 11 billion years back to the cosmos' busiest star-forming period, which happened about 3 billion years after the big bang.

[...] The program, called the Hubble Deep UV (HDUV) Legacy Survey, extends and builds on the previous Hubble multi-wavelength data in the CANDELS-Deep (Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey) fields within the central part of the GOODS (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey) fields. This mosaic is 14 times the area of the Hubble Ultra Violet Ultra Deep Field released in 2014.

Also at Popular Mechanics [popularmechanics.com].

The Imprint of Cosmic Reionization on the Luminosity Function of Galaxies [iop.org] (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aacbc4) (DX [doi.org])

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