Geneva – A team led by astronomers of the GinEbra University (UNIGE) He has discovered that galaxies could stop forming stars and “die” – what scientists call quiescent or off -off galaxies – before what was believed so far.
The team has analyzed data collected by the James Webb Special Telescope Through the Rubies program, and with them he has found a galaxy that at a relatively young age (700 million years old) stopped producing stars and began the process called in English “Quenching”, being the farthest of this type never discovered.
In comparison, our galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 13.6 billion years, only about 200 million years less than the universe created with the Big Bang, and continues to create stars in some of its areas.
“The discovery of the new galaxy implies that the quiescent galaxies in the first 1,000 million years of the universe are a hundred times more abundant than the current models predicted,” said the doctoral student of the Astronomy Department of Unige Andrea Weibel, the main author of the study.
According to the UNIGE, this finding also forces to reconsider other key factors in the current theoretical models of the universe, from the effects of star winds to those derived from the formation of black stars and holes in galaxies.
A typical galaxy forms stars through the absorption and concentration of gas, something that however cannot do indefinitely: in the universe known half of them have stopped doing so and are quiescent.
They are also known as “red and dead”, since there are no “blue”, young and bright stars, but red and smaller (our sun is at an intermediate age between them and is considered a “yellow” star).
The James Webb telescope has allowed us to observe galaxies so remote that the light that observes in them comes from times relatively close to the Big Bang and the birth of many of them, but thanks to advanced technologies such as the spectroscopy of nearby infrared infrared it has been identified that some of them were already quiescent in those times of “youth”.
The Rubies program (acronym in English of unknown red/extragalactic survey of bright infrared) is led by European countries and has analyzed thousands of galaxies, many of them never detected before.