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Key ingredient of galaxy formation measured

Measurements of faint radio emission from distant galaxies have revealed the nature of the gases that drove the epoch of peak galaxy formation — and also suggest why star-formation rates have since declined.
  1. Chris L. Carilli

    1. Chris L. Carilli is at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro, New Mexico 87801, USA.

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On my first day of graduate school, almost 40 years ago, my adviser asked me: “What is galaxy formation?” A stock answer for many cosmologists might be “the gravity-driven clustering of dark matter through cosmic time”, where dark matter is the mysterious invisible matter that is thought to make up most of the mass in the Universe. Normal ‘baryonic’ matter — hydrogen, helium and minor amounts of heavier elements — is just a trace mass component that goes along for the gravitational ride as galaxies coalesce. The answer my adviser gave to his trembling graduate student was “the gravitational accretion of gas onto haloes of dark matter, and its conversion into stars”. That’s because, to observational astronomers such as him (and now myself), the fun begins only when baryonic matter plays its part. Writing in Nature, Chowdhury et al.1 report findings that fill a crucial gap in our knowledge of the fun part of galaxy formation.

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Nature 586, 361-362 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02791-7

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