Astronomers have discovered a dead galaxy. Stars in it did not form 12.5 billion years

Astronomers believe that the first galaxies appeared as a result of direct gravitational collapse

giant clouds of gas that have been unevenly distributed throughout the universe since the Big Bang.

Most of these gas clots have turned intosolitary galaxies, others formed clusters and superseditions. It is believed that the first galaxies arose about 400-500 million years after the Big Bang.

Now, astronomers have used the ALMA and Hubble telescopes to discover a galaxy whose mass and size do not match theThe discovered galaxy was named XMM-2599, it diverges in the constellation Cetus.

Analysis of the structure of the spectrum of the object showed thata significant part of the stars in it arose almost simultaneously - approximately 750 million years after the Big Bang. At the same time, star formation completely stopped 500 million years after the start - thus, the last stars in XMM-2599 formed about 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang.

Even before the universe turned 2 billionyears, the XMM-2599 galaxy has become an ultra-heavyweight, giving rise to such a number of stars whose total mass exceeded the solar by 300 billion times. More surprisingly, almost all of these stars appeared in the first billion years of the life of the universe, after which the XMM-2599 stopped forming new stars.

University of California Press Service

Previously, American astronomers counted white dwarfs that rotate in the Milky Way at a short distance from each other.