Mighty galaxies from little galaxies grow. That’s the standard scenario for galaxy formation, and now astronomers have caught on-camera evidence of the process. A Hubble Space Telescope image has revealed the assembly of a large galaxy from dozens of smaller ones in the early universe.
Hubble zoomed in on the radio-emitting galaxy MRC 1138-262, which George Miley of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and his colleagues have now nicknamed “the spiderweb,” for its complexity and clumpiness.