Observatoire des droits humains (anglais seulement)

Astronomers found a galaxy in the throes of death – and they know what’s killing it

(Version anglaise seulement)

par Rebecca Davies, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology
Deanne Fisher, Associate Professor of Astronomy, Swinburne University of Technology

At the start of cosmic history, galaxies were big clouds of gas, and they grew by turning that gas into stars. If a galaxy runs out of gas, it will stop forming stars and die.

Present-day galaxies have had more than 10 billion years to grow old and die. But this is not true in the early universe: we expect to see very few dead galaxies in the first billion years of cosmic time.

In 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope gave us our first clear glimpse of galaxies in the early universe. What we saw completely defied our expectations: there were too many big, dead galaxies,…

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