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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

The faint little galaxies that could shed light on the early cosmos

Small galaxies seem to be forming stars the old-fashioned way: in splendid isolation.
Image from SHARDS study

Researchers studied this galaxy cluster, called Abell 370, in their search for galaxies that are in the process of forming stars. Credit: SHARDS research team

The first galaxies coalesced more than 12 billion years ago. Small and fairly short-lived, they helped to bring light and energy to a vast, dark sea of neutral atoms in a process known as reionization. Now, researchers have identified a clutch of galaxies relatively near Earth that could serve as good proxies for the study of those ancient galaxies1.

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Nature 599, 11 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02943-3

References

  1. Griffiths, A. et al. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 508, 3860–3876 (2021).

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