Imagine about the same number of stars in the tiny galaxy as in our huge Milky Way galaxy. Image courtesy NASA, ESA, A. Feild at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and P. van Dokkum at Yale University

It seems there never will be a shortage of stars. Now a team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the the Gemini South Telescope Near-Infrared Spectrograph in Chile have found young-for-their-time, 11-billion-year-old, compact galaxies filled with almost unimaginable quantities of new stars.

Their question now: how did these tiny galaxies, so rich in stars, come to be formed?

Could it be that the Universe has pockets of dark matter damming up pools of hydrogen gas, which then spins and rapidly forms stars? The astronomers don't know, but they assume whatever happened to form these ancient structures must have been spectacular.

In fact, those galaxies must have spawned a lot of stars in a very small space over a very short period of time.

While any one of these compact young galaxies would have been small enough to fit within the central hub of our own Milky Way, each contained as many stars as our galaxy.

Normally, when astronomers find more stars, they find bigger galaxies. Usually in past discoveries, tiny galaxies had smaller numbers of stars. But those tiny galaxies weren't as old as these.

Each of the newly discovered young galaxies is a mere 5,000 light-years or so across, yet they weigh 200 billion times the mass of our Sun. They are filled with a lot of stars.

Next question: did they bump into each other, stick, and grow into today's large galaxies?