A team of UC Irvine-led researchers recently stumbled upon a hungry, massive galaxy 10 times the size of our own Milky Way. The result of a collision between two smaller galaxies, the colossal formation's hydrogen feeding frenzy sheds new light on how old elliptical galaxies form and why they stop producing stars.
"Finding this type of galaxy is as important as the discovery of the archaeopteryx was in understanding dinosaurs' evolution into birds, because they were both caught at a critical transitional phase," said lead author Hai Fu from UC Irvine.
The two galaxies smashed into each other around 11 billion years ago, forming HXMM01. This super galaxy is now experiencing a death at its own hands - it has literally starved itself. After initial formation, the galaxy's voracious appetite for hydrogen has left it with little material to continue producing stars and the galaxy is dimming itself into non-existence.
"These galaxies entered a feeding frenzy that would quickly exhaust the food supply in the following hundreds of million years and lead to the new galaxy's slow starvation for the rest of its life," Fu said.
Elliptical galaxies differ from spiral galaxies such as our own in shape and composition. They appear mostly as bright blobs and most of the stars in elliptical galaxies are incredibly old red stars, causing many scientists to question how exactly they came about. Are they the result of smaller galaxies combining, or one massive star-creating explosion? Data from HXMM01 will help unravel the mystery.
HXMM01 was spotted using the European Space Agency's Herschel Telescope. You can read the full published study online in the journal Nature.
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