JAKARTA - Astronomers recently managed to find a galaxy the size of a rare monster that lived in the early days of the universe. The galaxy was growing fast and vanishing very quickly too.
As quoted by space.com, the newly discovered giant galaxy is named XMM-2599. If these galaxies were still around, it would likely be about 12 billion light years from Earth.
Regarding the existence of these galaxies, referring to the Bigbang Theory, the time when the universe was formed 13.82 billion years ago. The existence of the galaxy XMM-2599 may not be far away in the early days of the creation of the universe.
"Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had formed the mass of more than 300 billion suns making it an ultra-massive galaxy," said a researcher from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California Riverside (UCR), Benjamin Forrest.
"Amazingly, the galaxy XMM-2599 already formed most of its star (or sun) when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, and then became inactive when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old," added the person who became one of the research team for the XMM-2599 galaxy.
In their research, Forrest and his colleagues used a device called the Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration (MOSFIRE), which is mounted on a telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. With this tool, researchers can reveal the mass of XMM-2599 and how far it is from Earth.
Furthermore, the research revealed that the galaxy creates more than a thousand solar stars each year at the peak of its activity. In fact, as a comparison, the galaxy we live in today, namely the Milky Way, only forms one sun or new stars every year.
"What makes XMM-2599 interesting, unusual, and surprising is that the galaxy is no longer forming stars. Maybe because it is no longer getting its fuel or the black hole is starting to activate. Our results are to reveal how the model changes. in galaxies it can kill star formation, "said one member of the other UCR research team, Gillian Wilson.
To further uncover the characteristics and unanswered questions of the galaxy XMM-2599, researchers will continue to observe it using Keck. "We know that the mass of the galaxy will not be lost. So the interesting question is what is happening around it?" asked Wilson.
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