The galaxy that lived fast, died young
A huge but dead galaxy has been spotted in the very early Universe, only 1.65 million years after the Big Bang. Observations with the Keck Observatory have shown that the galaxy produced over three times the number of stars the Milky Way currently has, only to fall quiet just as most galaxies were getting started.
“This huge galaxy formed like a firecracker in less than 100 million years, right at the start of cosmic history,” says Karl Glazebrook from the Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, the study’s lead author. “It quickly [became] a monstrous object, then just as suddenly it quenched and turned itself off. As to how it did this, we can only speculate.”