SPACE.com -- Disturbed Youth: Hubble Finds Galaxy in the Making

Bluish areas in POX 186 indicate hot new stars near the core and in an arch at the right. The features suggest a recent collision and a galaxy in the process of forming. Reddish spots around the galaxy are objects mostly not affiliated with the galaxy.

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	Disturbed Youth: Hubble Finds Galaxy in the Making By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 10:35 am ET 19 December 2002

Youth can be disturbing

Youth can be disturbing. With galaxies, in fact, a disturbed look can be an indicator of youth.

So it is with a new Hubble Space Telescope picture, which shows a disrupted little pocket of stars that astronomers believe is a galaxy in the making. The late bloomer, named POX 186, probably began taking shape when two smaller clumps of gas and stars ran into each other less than 100 million years ago.

That's like yesterday compared to the billions of years it has taken other galaxies, such as the Milky Way, to grow to their present sizes and shapes. Most of the stars in mature galaxies are also billions of years old. Our Sun, for example, was born about 4.6 billion years ago.

The nearby POX 186 is just 900 light-years across and contains only about 10 million stars. The Milky Way is some 100,000 light-years wide and harbors more than 100 billion stars.

Evidence for the youthfulness of POX 186 is seen in a burst of newborn stars and its disturbed shape, astronomers said today. The recent collision likely triggered this star formation.

Most astronomers believe galaxies form through collisions, mergers and acquisitions. The new image supports that concept.

Michael Corbin of the Space Telescope Science Institute and William Vacca of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics used Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 to study POX 186 in March and June of 2000. Their results will appear in the Dec. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

"This is a surprising find," Corbin said. "We didn't expect to see any galaxies forming in the nearby universe. POX 186 lies only about 68 million light-years away, which means that it is relatively close to us in both space and time."

As the galaxy develops, its stars will pull into a more symmetrical shape, the researchers say. The end result will not be huge, but rather what astronomers refer to as a dwarf galaxy.

"POX 186 may be giving us a glimpse into the early star-formation process of all galaxies," Vacca said.

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