Page 6 - All About Space 68 - 2017 UK

LAUNCH PAD

YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE

Capturing a galaxy

with a gravitational

trick of the light

Combining the power of the ‘natural lens’ that is gravitational
lensing, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have
made an impressive discovery: the very first example of a
compact, yet massive, fast-spinning, disc-shaped galaxy that
ceased making stars only a few billion years after the Big Bang,
the event that kick-started the birth of our universe.
In this image, this extremely massive foreground galaxy
cluster MACS J2129-0741 magnifies, brightens and distorts
the distant background galaxy, MACS 2129-1 in the upper-
right corner of this shot. The finding challenges our current
understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve and is
the first direct evidence for so-called ‘dead’ galaxies, where star
formation has stopped.

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