Yesterday, we reported that an international team of astronomers Using W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii, led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, found an strange monster galaxy that existed about 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old, or 13 percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years. The team found that the galaxy, dubbed formed stars at a high rate and then died. Why it suddenly stopped forming stars is unclear.
“Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy,” said Ben Forrest, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Riverside about galaxy XMM-2599, that formed stars at a high rate and then inexplicably died. “More remarkably, we show that XMM-2599 formed most of its stars in a huge frenzy when the universe was less than one billion years old, and then became inactive by the time the universe was only 1.8 billion years old.”
“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.
