Galaxy Structure and Evolution

This book is regarding when we look at distant galaxies, we are looking back in time. We have now seen galaxies as they were when the universe was about 300 million years old only about two percent as old as it is now. The universe now is 13.8 billion years old. The color of a galaxy is an indicator of the age of the stars that populate it. Blue galaxies must contain a lot of hot, massive, young stars. Galaxies that contain only old stars tend to be yellowish red. The first generation of stars formed when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. Galaxies observed when the universe was only a few billion years old tend to be smaller than today’s galaxies, to have more irregular shapes, and to have more rapid star formation than the galaxies we see nearby in today’s universe. This shows that the smaller galaxy fragments assembled themselves into the larger galaxies we see today.