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Astronomers Detect the Earliest Galaxies
FiReaNGeL writes "Astronomers, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, have uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. They are from 13 billion years ago, just 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang. These newly found objects are crucial to understanding the evolutionary link between the birth of the first stars, the formation of the first galaxies, and the sequence of evolutionary events that resulted in the assembly of our Milky Way and the other 'mature' elliptical and majestic spiral galaxies in today's universe."
It may be. That is about a dynamical timescale for a galaxy merger. Star formation takes much less time than 600 million years. You would not be forming a lot of earth-like planets at that time because there was very little in the way of dust early on. Most solid phase material may have been ice rather than dust owing to the early relatively high abundance of oxygen produced in pair-instability supernovae.