This Ancient, ‘Monster’ Galaxy Should Have Destroyed Itself
Thanks to the efforts of a team from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, researchers have a new picture of what the monster galaxy looks like and how it works, a picture that’s 10 times higher-resolution than ever before. [101 Astronomy Images That Will Blow Your Mind]
“A real surprise is that this galaxy seen almost 13 billion years ago has a massive, ordered gas disk… instead of what we had expected, which would have been some kind of a disordered train wreck,” co-author Min Yun, an astronomer at UMass Amherst who helped discover AzTEC-1 back in 2007, said in a statement.