star-gazers have hit pay dirt. The fog shrouding the mystery of galactic births in universe is gradually giving way to the onslaughts of astronomers' telescopes, which have recently caught sight of galaxies that were in the act of formation. Two groups of researchers, working independently in the us and uk , have found evidence of the existence of distant galaxies almost as old as the universe itself, suggesting that galaxies might have formed fairly early in the history of the universe.

"These distant galaxies could contain the key to the process of galaxy formation and show us what our own Milky Way galaxy may have looked like as it was forming,' say scientists from the University of Durham, uk , who recently published their findings in Nature (Vol 383, No 6597). The Durham research team consisted of scientists from the Durham Cosmology Group, which has been active in the deep imaging (photographing distant gala xies) and galaxy count (counting number of objects in a galaxy) fields since 1976.
From clumps to dumps The authors of the Nature report have analysed what they claim to be the