Discovery shows early galaxies could have very short lives

You’d think that galaxies from the young universe would still be thriving, but that’s not necessarily the case. Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute and the National Observatory of Japan have discovered the farthest known dying galaxy (that is, with greatly suppressed star formation) known to date at about 12 billion light-years away. In other words, it was already waning roughly 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang — the first galaxies had come into being about a billion years earlier. The team used a combination of Keck telescope systems and the Very Large Telescope to measure the motion of stars and learn that the galaxy’s core was nearly fully formed.