Remember the spacecraft GALEX (which means Galaxy Evolution Explorer) that was sent to space with the mission of observing galaxies in ultraviolet light across 10 billion years of cosmic history through an incorporated telescope on April 28th of 2003? It’s now officially been traveling the space and sending information back to Earth for five years.
“GALEX’s ultraviolet observations are telling the scientists how galaxies, the building block of our Universe, evolve and change. GALEX observations are providing data for NASA’s investigators to find out when and how the stars that we see today were formed and which chemical elements are the galaxies made off.”
Now GALEX has already observed more than 100 million galaxies. The first comprehensive map of the Universe of galaxies is now ready for construction, helping us understand how galaxies like our own Milky Way were formed.
“In effect, GALEX acts like a time machine through which humans see the universe as it was a few billion years after its birth because it observes places so far away that the light reaching GALEX, even traveling at 299.792.458 meters per second is still the same as billions of years before.”
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