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Astrophysics

Era of the compact disk

Nature volume 473, pages 160–161 (2011)Cite this article

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Some of the strangest galaxies in the Universe just got stranger. It seems that many galaxies in the early Universe not only packed a huge number of stars into a very small volume, but were also rotating rapidly.

By historical standards the Universe is a boring place. Most galaxies have settled down into the routine of middle age and have all but given up on exciting activities such as forming new stars or fuelling black holes. Studying the light of very distant galaxies with powerful telescopes, astronomers are finding that things were a lot more interesting in the first third of the Universe's history. The most striking aspect of galaxies in those early epochs is their variety1,2. Some were forming stars hundreds of times faster than the Milky Way; others were dominated by accretion flows onto extremely massive black holes in their centres; and still others were crashing into one another to form larger galaxies. At the same time, a class of compact, massive galaxies existed that had already stopped forming new stars. Writing in The Astrophysical Journal, van der Wel et al.3 now argue that the majority of these galaxies were disk-shaped.

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Figure 1: Formation of a compact disk galaxy.

NASA/ESA/HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM (STSCI/AURA)

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  1. Pieter van Dokkum is in the Department of Astronomy, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.,

    Pieter van Dokkum

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  1. Pieter van Dokkum
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Correspondence to Pieter van Dokkum.

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van Dokkum, P. Era of the compact disk. Nature 473, 160–161 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/473160a

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