Utica, NY (WIBX) - A team of researchers has found evidence pointing to the fuel that forms stars in other galaxies.

Joseph Ribaudo, assistant professor of physics at Utica College- and member of the research team -explains what the discovery means.

"Essentially, it means that we found evidence for the fuel that galaxies need to form stars," Ribaudo said. "Galaxies, you can kind of think of as factories to form stars, and to form them they need materials. That material is gas."

With funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation, the group was able to study the gas using the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Hubble Space Telescope's Imaging Spectrograph.

Ribaudo says by analyzing the gas formed mainly of hydrogen and little else, the group is able to, in essence, look back in time to see how our own galaxy may have been formed.

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