Astronomers find a galaxy unchanged since the early universe

12/03/2018
There is a calculation suggesting that only one in a thousand massive galaxies is a relic of the early universe, conserving intact the properties it had when it was formed thousands of millions of years ago. For that reason when the researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), Michael Beasley  (advanced SO fellow) and Ignacio Trujillo located this rarity they wrote a proposal for time on the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the globular clusters surrounding it, and so confirm what had been suggested by the observations they had made with ground-based telescopes. The results of the research published today in Nature showed that the galaxy NGC 1277 has only red globular cluster which formed along with it, while practically lacks blue clusters that are a consequence of having absorbed other smaller galaxies, which confirms that this galaxy has remained unchanged since its formation. >> Read more