An international team led by Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy used ALMA observations to reveal how massive elliptical galaxies may form extremely rapidly in the early Universe. Studying the protocluster SPT2349‑56, just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, they observed dozens of gas-rich galaxies merging in a cosmic “firework,” with four central galaxies forming stars at a record-breaking rate of one every 40 minutes.
These observations provide the first glimpse of cascading mergers in protoclusters, offering crucial insight into how giant galaxies and the dense cores of modern clusters assembled in just a few hundred million years.
Read the MPIfR press release.
Image: Clusters of young galaxies in the early Universe that later grow into large clusters are called protoclusters. This artist’s impression of the protocluster SPT2349-56 shows interacting galaxies of different shapes and sizes, and gas (orange) that is torn apart and heated by tidal forces. Due to its great distance from Earth, we see SPT2349-56 as it looked only 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was 10% of its current age. © N.Sulzenauer, MPIfR