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posted by martyb on Thursday May 21 2020, @08:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the oh-say-canis-you-see? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In our 13.8 billion-year-old universe, most galaxies like our Milky Way form gradually, reaching their large mass relatively late. But a new discovery made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) of a massive rotating disk galaxy, seen when the universe was only ten percent of its current age, challenges the traditional models of galaxy formation. This research appears on 20 May 2020 in the journal Nature.

Galaxy DLA0817g, nicknamed the Wolfe Disk after the late astronomer Arthur M. Wolfe, is the most distant rotating disk galaxy ever observed. The unparalleled power of ALMA made it possible to see this galaxy spinning at 170 miles (272 kilometers) per second, similar to our Milky Way.

"While previous studies hinted at the existence of these early rotating gas-rich disk galaxies, thanks to ALMA we now have unambiguous evidence that they occur as early as 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang," said lead author Marcel Neeleman of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

[...] "Most galaxies that we find early in the universe look like train wrecks because they underwent consistent and often 'violent' merging," explained Neeleman. "These hot mergers make it difficult to form well-ordered, cold rotating disks like we observe in our present universe."

In most galaxy formation scenarios, galaxies only start to show a well-formed disk around 6 billion years after the Big Bang. The fact that the astronomers found such a disk galaxy when the universe was only ten percent of its current age, indicates that other growth processes must have dominated.

Journal Reference:

Marcel Neeleman & J. Xavier Prochaska, et al. A Cold, Massive, Rotating Disk 1.5 Billion Years after the Big Bang. Nature, 2020 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2276-y


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Kitsune008 on Friday May 22 2020, @01:08AM

    by Kitsune008 (9054) on Friday May 22 2020, @01:08AM (#997678)

    It is the result of gravitational interactions occurring where clumps of matter(mass) are warping spacetime.

    A crude and simplistic explanation:

    There is a lot of stuff flying around, bumping into other stuff, just missing other stuff and deflected by the gravity of the other stuff. Eventually stuff starts to build enough mass(gravitational pull) to capture stuff that near-misses it into an orbit. Then the central mass plus the orbiting mass start to gravitationaly interact with even more stuff...eventually you end up with a spinning universe filled with spinning galaxies, full of spinning star systems like our own Solar System.

    In a word: gravity. It really is that simple. (although, we are just beginning to have computers and programs powerful enough to run semi-accurate simulations of this) :-)

    Do note that I have no intention of belittling the sheer awesomeness, wonder, complexity, and amazing nature of our Universe. Astrophysics has been an interest, subject of casual/informal research, and hobby of mine for over 50 years.
    I have willingly jumped down that rabbit hole decades ago, and have no regrets...just an ever-growing fascination with new discoveries.

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