At 1.2 billion years young, the galaxy ALESS 073.1 of a young galaxy – a group of newly emitted stars and gas, should look chaotic early in the universe. Instead, this primordial starburst galaxy has a bulge in the center and a rotating belt that makes it look billions of years older. This strange corner of the universe was recently designed by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.
An international team of astronauts dug into the rapid development of the nascent galaxy in a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports. They found that the age of ALESS was less than 10% of the global average age, but parts of its structure reflect a much older entity. In particular, with the presence of a bulge in the center of the galaxy and a rotating disk around that center, it can be seen that astronomers have historically only seen in galaxies that have created more time, on the scale of billions of years.
“It was generally expected until a few years ago that galaxies in the primordial universe should be very chaotic,” Federico Lelli, an astronaut at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory in Italy, said in a video call. Lelli, lead author of the new paper, began work at the Southern European Observatory in Munich and continued at Cardiff University. “I would expect to see disorganized gas movements. But this is contrary to what we are seeing in this galaxy. ”
In the turmoil of the early universe, the idea was that new stars, and later galaxies, would come from the accumulation of gas and material from interspecific ether. The observed Lelli galaxy team suggests that the timeline of galactic formation needs to be revisited.
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“To put it in human terms, this galaxy looks like an 8-year-old, but it looks like a teenager or an adult,” Lelli saidid.
The research team did not see the bulge directly, which shows a density of stars that usually orbit a true black hole at the center of the galaxy. Instead, they determined the presence of the bulge by measuring the movement of gas and dust in the constellation. The same goes for orbiting the galaxy – the team was able to work out from gas measurements on either side of the galaxy, showing that some gas was moving towards the observer. while gas on the other side was moving away.
The bulge could have occurred through merging with another galaxy or through a largely unstable galactic structure, although Lelli said the latter is less likely.
“This remarkable discovery challenges our current understanding of how galaxies form because we believed that these traits only arose in ‘mature’ galaxies, not the young, ”co-author Timothy Davis, an astronomer at Cardiff University, said in a university press release.
Although the age of the ALESS rotating disk is unknown, it is still at the 1.2-billion year mark ahead of another known galactic disk.
“Ten years ago, we thought that created discs were probably halfway through the age of the universe,” Lelli said. Given that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, that would have been around 6.9 billion years ago. “And now we are at 10%. The goal post moves back and forth in time. ”
ALESS observations suggest that there may be more to the creation of alternative early galleries than previously thought.
“The question, of course, is how common something like this is, and whether this is the rule or the exception,” Lelli said. “To address this, we expect to see more galleries with a similar purpose.”
These observations of other galaxies were supposed to have occurred last year, but the covid-19 pandemic found its way. For an observatory like ALMA, which hosts hundreds of people in the middle of a desert, research has to be postponed. Lelli hopes that looking at other galleries will help contextualise the normalization of ALESS 073.1. With the future launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and the construction of the South European Observatory ‘s massive Telescope, it is fair to say that the future of space observation is bright, as long as we take the time to look.