{"id":21468,"date":"2017-04-10T01:00:29","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/?p=21468"},"modified":"2017-04-10T22:37:24","modified_gmt":"2017-04-11T08:37:24","slug":"ancient-dead-galaxy-sets-new-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/?p=21468","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Dead Galaxy Sets New Record"},"content":{"rendered":"

W. M. Keck Observatory press release<\/a>…<\/p>\n

\"Galaxy<\/a>
Artist\u2019s impression of galaxy ZF-COSMOS-20115. The galaxy has likely blown off all the gas that caused its rapid star formation and mass growth, and rapidly turned into a compact red galaxy. Credit: CREDIT: Leonard Doublet\/Swinburne University of Technology.<\/figcaption><\/figure>An international team of astronomers has, for the first time, spotted a massive, inactive galaxy from a time when the Universe was only 1.65 billion years old. This rare discovery, made using the world-class W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, could change the way scientists think about the evolution of galaxies. <\/p>\n

This research publishes today in the journal Nature, with Professor Karl Glazebrook, director of Swinburne\u2019s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing , as the lead author. To characterize the faint galaxy, the discovery team used MOSFIRE, the most in-demand instrument on the 10-meter Keck I telescope.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis observation was only possible due to the extreme sensitivity of the new MOSFIRE spectrograph,\u201d said Glazebrook. \u201cIt is the absolute best in the world for faint near-IR spectra by a wide margin. Our team is indebted to the accomplishment of Chuck Steidel, Ian McClean, and all the Keck Observatory staff for building and delivering this remarkable instrument.\u201d<\/p>\n

Astronomers expect most galaxies from this epoch to be low-mass minnows, busily forming stars. However, this galaxy is \u2018a monster\u2019 and inactive. <\/p>\n

The researchers found that within a short time period this massive galaxy, known as ZF-COSMOS-20115, formed all of its stars (three to five times more than our Milky Way today) through an extreme star-burst event. <\/p>\n

But it stopped forming stars only a billion years after the Big Bang to become a quiescent or \u2018red and dead\u2019 galaxy \u2013 common in our Universe today, but not expected to exist at this ancient epoch.<\/p>\n

The galaxy is also small and extremely dense, it has 300 billion stars crammed into a region of space about the same size as the distance from the Sun to the nearby Orion Nebula.<\/p>\n