HONG KONG: Astronomers have discovered a nest of massive baby galaxies 11.5 billion light-years away, which are seemingly placed at the junction of filaments of dark matter.
The galaxies were discovered using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, and are very helpful for better understanding how massive galaxies such as these are formed and how they evolve into elliptical galaxies.
While the universe is fairly quiet now, ten billion years ago, certain areas of the universe were inhabited by massive galaxies that had star formation rates hundreds or thousands of time than what is observed in the Milky Way today.
Galaxy formation theories suggest that the monstrous galaxies formed in special environments with large concentrations of dark matter. However, it has been fairly difficult to determine the locations of active star-forming galaxies, partly because of the dust obscuring them to be observed from Earth.
Understanding how dark matter influenced early galaxies is extremely important for the understanding of the evolution of the modern universe. The discovery of galaxies embedded in dark matter junctions could help us understand why monstrous early galaxies do not exist in the modern universe any more.
Galaxies were identified by precisely measuring their distances from a visible patch of space called SSA22 in the constellation Aquarius. Those locations were then compared with the galaxy cluster’s shape as observed by the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan to determine the gravitational location of a dark matter intersection.
The findings support the idea that the modern universe originally formed within a massive dark matter accumulations.
