*Nature: A massive galaxy in its core formation phase three billion years after the Big Banghttp://hubblesite.org/news/2014/37
NASA Telescopes Help Uncover Early Construction Phase Of Giant Galaxy
Astronomers have for the first time gotten a glimpse of the earliest stages of massive galaxy construction. The building site, dubbed "Sparky," is a developing galaxy containing a dense core that is blazing with the light of millions of newborn stars which are forming at a ferocious rate. The discovery was made possible through combining observations from NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Because the infant galaxy is so far away, it is seen as it appeared 11 billion years ago, just 3 billion years after the birth of the universe in the big bang. Astronomers think the compact galaxy will continue to grow, possibly becoming a giant elliptical galaxy, a gas-deficient assemblage of ancient stars theorized to develop from the inside out, with a compact core marking its beginnings.
"We really hadn't seen a formation process that could create things that are this dense," explained Erica Nelson of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, lead author of the science paper announcing the results. "We suspect that this core-formation process is a phenomenon unique to the early universe because the early universe, as a whole, was more compact. Today, the universe is so diffuse that it cannot create such objects anymore." ...
ABOUT THIS IMAGE:
The core of an emerging galaxy is ablaze with newly formed stars in this never-before-seen view of the early construction phase of an elliptical galaxy. Astronomers spotted the glowing core in this Hubble Space Telescope image from the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS). The arrow in the enlarged inset image points to the growing galaxy's bright, compact core. The galaxy is seen as it appeared 11 billion years ago, just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
Although only a fraction of the size of the Milky Way, the tiny powerhouse galaxy already contains about twice as many stars as our galaxy, all crammed into a region only 6,000 light-years across. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across. Astronomers think the newly formed galaxy will continue to grow, possibly becoming similar to the giant elliptical galaxies seen today. This barely visible galaxy may be representative of a much larger population of similar objects that are obscured by dust.
The image combines observations taken in near-infrared light with the Wide Field Camera 3 and exposures made in visible light with the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Object Name: GOODS-N-774
Image Type: Astronomical/Annotated
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz), and the GOODS team
The research team's paper appears in the August 27 issue of the journal Nature.*†
Erica Nelson, Pieter van Dokkum, Marijn Franx, et al
† A pdf copy of this paper is available for free download from http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archiv ... 7/related/
News release also available from: http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1418/
