“We found that its core seems already fully formed at that time,” says Masayuki Tanaka who led a team of researchers of the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute and the National Observatory of Japan about a recently discovered massive galaxy already dying only 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. “This result pairs up with the fact that, when these dying gigantic systems were still alive and forming stars, they might have not been that extreme compared with the average population of galaxies”, adds Francesco Valentino, author of an article on the past history of dead galaxies appeared in the Astrophysical Journal.
Today’s “Galaxy Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our knowledge of the Milky Way and the Universe beyond.
“If we point a telescope to the sky and take a deep image, we can see so many galaxies out there. But our understanding of how these galaxies form and grow is still quite limited — especially when it comes to massive galaxies,” said Masayuki Tanaka, at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan about an ancient galaxy more massive than our Milky Way that has revealed that the ‘cores’ of massive galaxies in the Universe had formed already 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, about 1 billion years earlier than previous measurements.
Each tiny dot in the radio image above, captured by astronomers using the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) MeerKAT telescope, is a distant galaxy, with the brightest spots galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes. These are distant galaxies like the Milky Way that have never been observed in radio light before.
