Massive galaxy found in early universe

May 21, 2020 | Cosmology, Daily Space, Galaxies

Massive galaxy found in early universe
IMAGE: Artist impression of the Wolfe Disk, a massive rotating disk galaxy in the early, dusty universe. The galaxy was initially discovered when ALMA examined the light from a more distant quasar (top left). CREDIT: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

A week after talking about a survey of galaxies formed in the early universe that rotates, we are getting a new press release announcing that the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array has discovered a particularly massive galaxy in the early universe. DLA0817g is the most distant galaxy found to be rotating. Its light started the journey to our telescopes just 1.5 billion years after the universe formed, and to get a massive galaxy fully formed this early in the universe would require this particular system to grow through the accumulation of massive amounts of cold gas that collapse en masse into this system. 

In astronomy, we sometimes talk about how galaxies form either through a bottom-up or a top-down approach, where either a myriad of small galaxies come together through mergers to form giant systems — this is what we talked about last week — or a singular mass of gas collapses into a giant galaxy in one turbulent event. This week’s big, rotating, early-forming galaxy is of the singular collapse variety. Sometimes, there are lots of ways to get to the same outcome, and it’s not “either/or” but instead “and” when it comes to ways to make galaxies grow.

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