Strange Galaxies in the Early Universe Were Shaped by Weird Stars

The earliest stars in the Universe began forming some 100 million years after the Big Bang. They lived fast, died young, and left behind material that got recycled into the next generations of stars. Along the way, these also influenced the evolution of their galaxies. CREDIT: NASA/STScI/A. Schaller.

Galaxies and their stars in the early Universe look a lot weirder than those we see today, and astronomers want to know why. A team of researchers at the University of Utah decided to survey certain stars in nearby galaxies as analogs of those that existed when the Universe was still in its infancy. The survey, called the "Treasury of Extremely Metal-Poor O Stars (TEMPOS), used the ultraviolet (UV) light streaming from those relatively close-by stars as detected by the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

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