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Galaxy formation

Too small to ignore

Nature volume 460, pages 694–695 (2009)Cite this article

A study of one galaxy's dynamics backs up previous claims that surprisingly compact galaxies existed in the early Universe. But how such objects blew up in size to form present-day galaxies remains a puzzle.

Giant red elliptical galaxies are the oldest and most massive assemblies of stars in the nearby Universe. Large optical telescopes have tracked their evolution back through 11 billion years — about 80% of the Universe's lifetime — by observing them at large cosmological redshifts1,2,3. Observations seemed to indicate that nothing much had happened to them over this time, except that they grew rarer in the more distant past. It was thus a surprise when astronomers discovered recently that these galaxies have grown in size by a factor of five over this period while barely changing in mass. This is like suddenly discovering that Roman Londinium had the same population as Greater London does today. This extreme size and density evolution was not predicted by theories of galaxy formation, and remains difficult to explain.

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Figure 1: Bloating galaxies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karl Glazebrook is at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia. karl@astro.swin.edu.au ,

    Karl Glazebrook

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  1. Karl Glazebrook
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Glazebrook, K. Too small to ignore. Nature 460, 694–695 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/460694a

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