The Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has taken an image of a "starburst" galaxy, NGC 3310, 59 light years away in the constellation of Ursa Major. A starburst galaxy features "extremely rapid and active star formation, taking less than 100,000 years, triggered by a possible collision with another galaxy", according to astronomers. Other HST images have revealed "the building blocks" of present-day galaxies 13.5 billion light years away. The distance is based on an estimate that the universe is 14 billion years old. The appearance of "instant" galaxies seems to have caught astronomers off guard. They would have expected to have seen galaxies in the process of being created, but none have been spotted, leading to arbitrary estimates of the age of the universe of up to 20 billion years.
Source: Flight International
