early galaxies tagged posts

Columbia researchers analyzing images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found that galaxies in the early universe are often flat and elongated, like breadsticks—and are rarely round, like balls of pizza dough.

“Roughly 50 to 80% of the galaxies we studied appear to be flattened in two dimensions,” explained Viraj Pandya, a NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia University and the lead author of a new paper slated to appear in The Astrophysical Journal that outlines the findings...

Regular spiral galaxies, such as the ‘whirlpool galaxy’ on the left, form far fewer stars than the clumpy galaxy on the right. The blue regions have the least star-forming gas and red-yellow regions have the most. Credit: Dr Danail Obreschkow, ICRAR. Image uses data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Australian researchers have discovered why some galaxies are “clumpy” rather than spiral in shape – and it appears low spin is to blame. The finding challenges an earlier theory that high levels of gas cause clumpy galaxies and sheds light on the conditions that brought about the birth of most of the stars in the Universe.

Dr Danail Obreschkow from ICRAR, said 10B years ago the Universe was full of clumpy galaxies but these developed into more regular objects as they evolved...