The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have teamed up to 'weigh' the stars in distant galaxies. One of these galaxies is not only one of the most distant ever seen, but it appears to be unusually massive and mature for its place in the young Universe.
For such a young galaxy, it has more stars then our Milky Way. It sounds like an abnormality. Something that shouldn't be, but is. So either there is something we do not know yet or we did not take into account, or something may be wrong or missing in the current theory. And distant means far way but also younger. So how did something so young get so mature so fast? That would be quite a nice question to ask, and it is probably the question many people are asking themselves now.
This galaxy appears to have 'bulked up' amazingly quickly, within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang," said Bahram Mobasher of the European Space Agency and the Space Telescope Science Institute, a member of the team that discovered the galaxy.
It made about eight times more mass in terms of stars than are found in our own Milky Way today, and then, just as suddenly, it stopped forming new stars. It appears to have grown old prematurely.
It would only indicate that there was enough matter around at the time to do so, but I'm only an interested person, there must have been something else as well, that made that possible. Gravity must have been very strong there. Gravity grows faster every time a certain amount of mass is added. Gravity itself is a very weak force, which may sound strange, because when you let go of an apple it falls down. That is gravity.
But for example Phobos, a moon of Mars has such a low gravity, that a human being weighs as much as mouse. (I wonder why no one goes to Phobos first and then to Mars. It is easier to land on Phobos and then on Mars, and it can be used to bult a base around it, for communications and the like. Just a thought )
And all those asteroids and debris that flies to space also have gravity. But some object's gravity is so low that we probably do not have any equipment yet that can measure it. So one can only logically conclude that there must have been a lot of matter around, and that it collapsed very fast, under the influence of an ever-growing gravity, and that as the universe was expanding, it lost some of that matter. That might explain why it formed so much stars, and then stopped forming new stars all of a sudden. If there is no matter to form new stars, then they can't form any more.
Article comments
1 - Floris Vermeir
The explenation ia very simple. At the time that the big baby galaxy formed, there was more matter around, and more dense spread, then there was at the time that the Milky way started froming. As such the big baby galaxy gravity pulled more matter to it,what resulted in even more matter being pulled to it. As such it became as massive it is now. The Milky way which is older, but started forming later in a universe where matter was more spreadout could not gather so much matter, and as result became less massive. It is very simple, logic actually.
One could say that the growing baby galaxy acted like a kind of catalisator whichs grwing gravity attracted matter, which reuslted in star and possibly planet formation, and which in the end result or may already have resulted, in that matter being spread again.