By studying images of the faintest galaxies ever detected, astronomers at the University of Durham have shown that galaxies formed when the universe was only 20-30 % of its present age - earlier than expected according to some popular cosmological theories. Members of the Durham Cosmology Group, led by Dr Tom Shanks, combined data from the Hubble Space Telescope - the 'Hubble Deep Field' - with new pictures from the 4.2-metre William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in the Canary Islands and from the 3.8-metre UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) on Hawaii. These new pictures have penetrated the depths of space further than any previous pictures taken with ground-based telescopes. The results are published in the scientific journal 'Nature' on 19 September 1996 (vol. 383, p. 236).