Distant star forming galaxies
Wild early lives of today's most massive galaxies revealed. Astronomers from Durham University have helped find the strongest link so far between the most powerful bursts of star formation in the early Universe and the most massive galaxies found today. The galaxies, flowering with dramatic starbursts in the early Universe, saw the birth of new stars abruptly cut short, leaving them as massive - but passive - galaxies of aging stars in the present day. The astronomers also have a likely culprit for the sudden end to the starbursts - the emergence of supermassive black holes. The Durham scientists were part of an international team of astronomers who combined observations from the LABOCA camera on the ESO-operated 12-metre Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope with measurements made with ESO's Very Large Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and others, to look at the way that bright, distant galaxies are gathered together in groups or clusters. The more closely the galaxies are clustered, the more massive are their halos of dark matter - the invisible material that makes up the vast majority of a galaxy's mass. The new results are the most accurate clustering measurements ever made for this type of galaxy.
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