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Galaxies like the Milky Way had a stellar 'baby boom' 10 billion years ago, according to one of the most detailed galaxy surveys to date.

Astronomers believe that at that time, galaxies churned out stars at a prodigious rate, about 30 times faster than today.

Our sun was late to this party, not forming until roughly five billion years ago - and its late appearance may to thank for life on Earth. 

Artist's view of night sky from a hypothetical planet within a young Milky Way-like galaxy 10 billion years ago, the sky are ablaze with star birth. Pink clouds of gas harbor newborn stars, and bluish-white, young star clusters litter the landscape

Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were more abundant later in the star-forming boom as more massive stars ended their lives early.

This enriched the galaxy with material that served as the building blocks of planets and even life on Earth.

Astronomers don't have baby pictures of our Milky Way's formative years to trace the history of stellar growth so they studied galaxies similar in mass to our Milky Way.

The farther into the universe astronomers look, the further back in time they are seeing, because starlight from long ago is just arriving at Earth now.

These Hubble snapshots show how galaxies similar in mass to our Milky Way evolved over time. Milky Way-like galaxies grow larger in size and in stellar mass over billions of years

Galaxies like the Milky Way had a stellar 'baby boom' 10 billion years ago, according to one of the most detailed galaxy surveys to date. Astronomers believe that at that time, galaxies churned out stars at a prodigious rate, about 30 times faster than today

From those surveys, stretching back in time more than 10 billion years, researchers assembled an album of images containing nearly 2,000 snapshots of Milky Way-like galaxies.

The new census provides the most complete picture yet of how galaxies like the Milky Way grew over the past 10 billion years into today's majestic spiral galaxies.

The multi-wavelength study spans ultraviolet to far-infrared light, combining observations from Nasa's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the Herschel Space Observatory, and ground-based telescopes.

'This study allows us to see what the Milky Way may have looked like in the past,' said Casey Papovich of Texas A&M University in College Station, lead author on the paper that describes the study's results.

'It shows that these galaxies underwent a big change in the mass of its stars over the past 10 billion years, bulking up by a factor of 10, which confirms theories about their growth.

'And most of that stellar-mass growth happened within the first 5 billion years of their birth.'

The new analysis reinforces earlier research which showed that Milky Way-like galaxies began as small clumps of stars.

The galaxies swallowed large amounts of gas that ignited a firestorm of star birth.

The study reveals a strong link between the galaxies' star formation and growth in stellar mass. So, when the galaxies slow down making stars, their growth decreases as well.

'I think the evidence suggests that we can account for the majority of the buildup of a Milky Way-like galaxy through its star formation,' Papovich said.

'When we calculate the star-formation rate of a Milky Way-like galaxy in the past and add up all the stars it would have produced, it is pretty consistent with the mass growth we expected.

'To me, that means we're able to understand the growth of the 'average' galaxy with the mass of a Milky Way galaxy.'

Our sun was late to this party, not forming until roughly five billion years ago - and its late appearance may to thank for life on Earth