Like parents of a precocious child, astronomers expressed amazement on Wednesday about the universe's development. It turns out the cosmos is growing up much faster than scientists ever expected.
The tell-tale sign of the early maturation of the universe is a giant string of galaxies that clumped together in a coherent structure just 2.8 billion years after the theoretical Big Bang explosion that astronomers believe started it all.
This kind of articulate clumping was not expected until the universe was about half its current age of 13.7 billion years, said Bruce Woodgate of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
"It was a surprise that they (the galaxies) weren't randomly distributed," Woodgate said at a news briefing at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta.
Astronomers figured such structures could form as late as 6 billion years ago, when the universe was some 7.7 years old. Sophisticated, orderly structures would require extra billions of years to get together, theorists believed. But Wednesday's findings show these structures formed billions of years earlier.
The structure is truly huge. Stretching across a full-moon-size splotch of the southern sky in the constellation Grus (The Crane), the string is some 300 million light-years long. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), the distance light travels in a year.
More significant is the seeming order in the structure. The presumption was that galaxies in the early universe were more diffusely scattered, instead of being gathered in by gravity into tight bunches surrounded by voids. The theory was that gravity has not had time enough to work.
Woodgate said 21st century observers would not be impressed in terms of sheer size because these kinds of structures are common enough in the modern universe.
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