London(June 24, 2017): Astronomers have detected a first-of-its kind compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the Big Bang.
The finding, published in the the journal Nature, was possible with the capability of NASA’s Hubble space telescope.
Finding such a galaxy early in the history of the universe challenges the current understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve, the researchers said.
When Hubble photographed the galaxy, astronomers expected to see a chaotic ball of stars formed through galaxies merging together.
Instead, they saw evidence that the stars were born in a pancake-shaped disk.
This was the first direct observational evidence that at least some of the earliest so-called “dead” galaxies – where star formation stopped – somehow evolve from a Milky Way-shaped disk into the giant elliptical galaxies.
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