New research shows that during the early universe cosmic filaments ferried cold gas and embryonic, node-shaped galaxies to a dark matter halo, where it all clumped together to form massive galaxies. The larger the galaxy, the more cold gas it needs to coalesce and to grow from a source of cold molecular gases totaling as much as 100 billion times the mass of our sun.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”