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<div class="body-head">JAYMES SONG
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Associated Press
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HONOLULU - An international team of scientists using a telescope on the Big Island have discovered evidence that many galaxies were formed earlier and faster than previously believed.

The findings, released Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta, are similar those made by a team of scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope that also are being released at the meeting.

Previous theories suggested it took billions of years for smaller galaxies to merge into larger ones.

But researchers using the Gemini North Telescope on the summit of the Big Island's inactive Mauna Kea volcano discovered larger, or older, galaxies also existed about 11 billion years ago - less than three billion years after the Big Bang, said Jean-Rene Roy, Gemini's associate director.

"Basically, they are more mature than we thought," Roy said. "The implication of this - we will rethink the way galaxies are assembled. Things must have come together much faster than we thought from the present understanding."

He compared the findings to a teacher walking into a classroom expecting to greet a room full of teenagers and finding adults instead.

"The kids have grown to young adults much quicker than we thought," Roy said. "This has been suggested by other people, but what our guys did was, they found the big ones. They found the young adults."

In addition to their release at the meeting, the results of the "Gemini Deep Deep Survey" also are to be published in several scientific journals, Roy said.

"We are seeing that a large fraction of the stars in the universe are already in place when the Universe was quite young, which should not be the case," said Roberto Abraham, a University of Toronto astronomer and one of the lead investigators of the study. "This glimpse back in time shows pretty clearly that we need to rethink what happened during this early epoch in galactic evolution. The theoreticians will definitely have something to gnaw on."

The survey used the 8-meter Gemini, one of the world's largest telescopes, and a special technique to capture the faintest galactic light ever dissected into a spectrum.

In all, spectra from over 300 galaxies were collected, most of which are within what is called the "Redshift Desert."

The study, which required more than 120 hours of telescope time, also suggested that black holes played a role in the early formation of galaxies.

The astronomers using the Hubble telescope captured images of the oldest and most distant galactic clusters ever seen, a discovery that shows immense numbers of stars formed less than 2 billion years after the birth of the cosmos.

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The Gemini Observatory: <a href="http://www.gemini.edu/">http://www.gemini.edu/</a>

Study: Galaxies Formed Earlier, Faster