Astronomers are currently training their eyes on a perplexing sight somewhere in the far off reaches of space. Nine young, compact galaxies have caught their attention due to some of their very unique properties.

Spanning only 5,000 light-years across - a mere fraction of today's grownup galaxies - the newly discovered galaxies weigh as much as 200 billion times the mass of our own Sun. Each contains approximately the same number of stars as a standard galaxy, which does not account for its unprecedented mass.

These galaxies were observed using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The goal of the study was to observe galaxies as they existed 11 billion years, when the universe was less than 3 billion years old.

It was theorized that the dense mass of these galaxies was due to the interaction of dark matter and hydrogen gas in the nascent universe. Hydrogen gas trapped in puddles of the invisible dark matter spin under a vast gravitational whirlpool, which in turn form stars at a furious rate.

This theory might explain the speed at which the stars are spinning around their galactic disks. The estimated speed of the stars are estimated at around 890,000 to 1 million miles per hour, around twice as fast as today's galaxies rotate.

Scientists are looking forward to finding more evidence to these compact galaxies in the near future. Hubble will be scheduled to receive the Wide Field Camera 3 during its Servicing Mission 4 in fall of this year. Hopefully, this will shed a little more light on the subject once Hubble gets the much needed upgrade.