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An illustration of a newly discovered wide orbit gas giant -Exoplanet. | Credit: C.Tortora/Inspire/VST/ESO/LBT
Astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy that is a “cosmic fossil” that has remained “frozen in good time for billions of years.
Just as the dinosaur fossils are used here on Earth to examine the development of life, this cosmic fossil could be used in the form of the Galaxy Kids J0842+0059 to understand cosmic evolution.
A cosmic fossil is a galaxy that managed to remain unchanged by collisions and interactions with other galaxies. This means that you can act as flawless time capsules to help astronomers study earlier galaxies.
The latest studies that have been carried out using data from the large binoculars telescope (LBT) has shown that this galaxy has remained unchanged for around 7 billion years.
“We have discovered a galaxy that has been perfectly preserved for billions of years.
“Fossil galaxies are like the dinosaurs of the universe: If we study them, we can understand which environmental conditions they have formed and how the most solid galaxies we see today have developed.”
The children are doing well
Children J0842+0059, 3 billion light years away from earth, was discovered by the children (kilo degree survey) in 2018.
Pictures of the galaxy, which was provided by the very large telescopic scope (VST), made it possible to measure astronomers to measure the size and mass of the children J0842+0059. These measurements were perfected by the very large telescope (VLT) and its X shooter instrument.
This showed that children J0842+0059 have an excellent mass of around a hundred billion times of the sun, but are more compact than similar mass galaxies. It was also found that children J0842+0059 have no star development for a large part of their lives. All of this indicated that it was a fossil galaxy.
The Relic Galaxy Kids J0842+0059 observed with the VST as part of the child survey (left) and with the large binocular telescope (right). | Credit: C. Tortora/Inspire/VST/ESO/LBT
In order to remove uncertainties about the properties of children J0842+0059, in particular its size and structure, this team made the use of the adaptive optics system of the LBT in order to obtain sharper images of this relic galaxy. This led to pictures with ten times details of the children that provided pictures.
“Data from the LBT have made it possible for us to confirm that children J0842+0059 are actually compact and therefore a real Galaxy relic with a similar form such as NGC 1277 and the compact galaxies that we observe in the early stages of the universe,” said the team member Chiara Spiniello, a researcher at Oxford. “This is the first time that we were able to do this with such high -resolution data for a galaxy relic.”
NGC 1277 is another example of a rare, stunted galactic fossil, which is around 240 million light years away in the Persus cluster, which means that it is much closer to home than children J0842+0059.
The Relic Galaxy NGC 1277, as the Hubble world space telescope can be seen. | Credit: M. Beasley (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias)/NASA/ESA
The fact that there are galaxies such as NGC 1277 and children J0842+0059 shows that some galaxies are quickly formed, remain compact and can rest in billions of years by avoiding collisions with other galaxies.
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“The examination of these cosmic fossils helps us to reconstruct the education history of today’s massive galaxies that – in contrast to relic galaxies – have gone through fusion processes and matter directly for the first compact galaxies from which they came,” said Tortora. ” We can improve our understanding of this type of galaxy.
“In the near future, we will take a step forward to seek, confirm and examine new relics galaxies through the unique quality and high -resolution data of the Euclidean space telescope.”
The team’s research was published in the monthly information from the Royal Astronomical Society.
