Discovered galaxy is the baby of 100 kilos

amsterdam - An international team of astronomers has discovered a giant galaxy from when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old. Scientists are puzzled, because the size of the relatively new system goes against all prevailing theories.

The system should be short growing extremely rapidly after the big bang, say the researchers who published their findings Thursday in Nature. 'Giant system is like a baby of hundred kilos with a beard,' says researcher Ivo Labbé of Leiden University. 'The system is more massive than our Galaxy and stopped forming new stars when the universe was young only about 1 billion years. By comparison, our Milky Way is more than twenty times as long to grow. '

It is still unclear how the galaxy, which bears the name ZF-COSMOS-20115, has been able to grow so quickly. So quickly become so large, the system would would almost all have used the gas in its vicinity. Current theories however, assume that galaxies use less than ten percent of the available gas.

The researchers suspect that there are more of these giant systems. Which may hide behind dust clouds or too faint to be seen from Earth. The James Webb telescope and spacious with the ALMA telescopes in Chile hope to trace the researchers more systems in the future.