The authors of this work report the discovery of the most distant, spectroscopically-confirmed galaxy found to date, which presently lies about 30 billion light years from Earth. The galaxy is being observed as it was at a time just 700 million years after the Big Bang, which is a mere 5% of the universe’s current age of 13.8 billion years.
The densest galaxy in the local Universe may have been found. M60-UCD1 is most likely a tidally-stripped remnant of a more massive progenitor galaxy. Strader et al. predicts that the progenitor of M60-UCD1 was ~ 50-200 times more massive, suggesting that it was once an elliptical galaxy that has been stripped of most of its mass.
The authors of today’s paper find out just what kind of star formation history lies in the Milky Way’s next meal: The Small Magellanic Cloud. After all, they say you are what you eat.
Galaxies have more than doubled in size since they first formed, but why?
A team of researchers present multiwavelength observations of a rare merger between two massive, gas-rich starburst galaxies at a redshift of 2.3. This kind of merger could help explain the presence of the most massive elliptical galaxies at high redshift.
Huang et al. dig up evidence that distant “red nugget” galaxies grew into the massive ellipticals we see today by consuming smaller, gas-poor galaxies.