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The University of Edinburgh | Ancient galaxy revealed by space telescope

Astronomers using the most powerful telescope ever built have identified a massive, densely packed galaxy 25 billion light years away. The galaxy – known as GS-9209 – formed just 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, and is the earliest of its kind found to date, researchers say. A team led by researchers from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh has used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to reveal in detail the properties of GS-9209 for the first time. Despite being around 10 times smaller than the Milky Way, GS-9209 has a similar number of stars to our own galaxy. These have a combined mass around 40 billion times that of our Sun, and were formed rapidly before star formation in GS-9209 stopped, the team says. GS-9209 is the earliest known example of a galaxy no longer forming stars – known as a quiescent galaxy. When the team observed it at 1.25 billion years after the Big Bang, no stars had formed in the galaxy for about half a billion years. Analysis also shows that GS-9209 contains a supermassive black hole at its centre that is five times larger than astronomers might anticipate in a galaxy with this number of stars. The discovery could explain why GS-9209 stopped forming new stars, the team says. Read more at The University of Edinburgh.