If I were an Intelligent Design advocate I could raise hell with this
New-Found Old Galaxies Upsetting Astronomers' Long-Held Theories on the Big Bang
By KENNETH CHANG
ATLANTA, Jan. 7 — Gazing deep into space and far into the past, astronomers have found that the early universe, a couple of billion years after the Big Bang, looks remarkably like the present-day universe.
Astronomers said here on Monday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society that they had found huge elliptical galaxies that formed within one billion to two billion years after the Big Bang, perhaps a couple of billion years earlier than expected.
A few days earlier, researchers had announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had spotted a gathering cloud of perhaps 100 galaxies from the same epoch, an early appearance of such galactic clusters.
On Wednesday, astronomers at the meeting said that three billion years after the Big Bang, one of the largest structures in the universe, a string of galaxies 300 million light-years long and 50 million light-years wide, had already formed. A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year, or almost six trillion miles.
That means the string is nearly 2,000 billion billion miles long.
Some astronomers said the discoveries could challenge a widely accepted picture of the evolution of the universe, that galaxies, clusters and the galactic strings formed in a bottom-up fashion, that the universe's small objects formed first and then clumped together into larger structures over time.
"The universe is growing up a little faster than we had thought," said Dr. Povilas Palunas of the University of Texas, one of the astronomers who found the string of galaxies. "We're seeing a much larger structure than any of the models predict. So that's surprising."
