Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Hubble Helps Solve Mystery of Ultra-Compact, Burned-Out Galaxies



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A certain class of massive galaxies in the early universe lived fast and died young. By "died" astronomers mean that the galaxies had completed building stars just 3 billion years after the big bang. By contrast, our 12-billion-year-old Milky Way galaxy continues making stars today. When star formation stops, the aging stellar population looks redder in the star-forming galaxies that are more bluish. The nickname for the essentially "burned-out" galaxies is "red and dead."




via HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/10/

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