a primitive galaxy that has stopped spinning much earlier than expected
When we think of a spiral galaxywe normally imagine it in rotating motion. It is logical that we do it. After all, that’s what most people do. Only some may have stopped their spin due to collisions or interactions with other galaxies. It is a process that takes many thousands of years. Therefore, when a team of scientists from the University of California Davis came across a very young galaxy completely still They didn’t believe what they were seeing. “Only” 2,000 million years. The galaxy in question, XMM-VID1-2075, formed 2 billion years ago after the big bang. It is a very primitive galaxy, but the light that reaches us is from a young galaxy, which has not had time to stop its spin as planned. The James Webb Space Telescope has observed her along with two other galaxies with similar characteristics, but those do move. Therefore, this must have something special that intrigues scientists a lot. Different movements. Both this galaxy and the other two had been detected and described for the first time thanks to the WM Keck observatory, located in Hawaii. The James Webb intended to study them in more detail and focus attention on their movement. It has been seen that one of them moves normally and the other in a somewhat disordered way, but both rotate. Only XMM-VID1-2075 has stopped spinning. Yes, it has some very chaotic internal movement, but no circles. Important data. Thanks to these observations it has been seen that this galaxy is very massive, one of the most massive primitive galaxies that have been detected so far. It has also been observed that new stars are no longer forming inside it. All this data leads us to think what could have happened to stop its rotation so soon. An unexpected merger. The authors of this research believe that, instead of many collisions over a long time, this galaxy experienced the early merger of a single galaxy that was spinning in completely the opposite direction. This offset his movement and caused him to stop. It is a hypothesis that is also supported by the fact that there is a large concentration of light on one side of the galaxy. Possibly where the merger occurred. Very few. According to the simulations carried out following this study, there should be very few galaxies like this in the universe. However, it will be interesting to find them, in order to understand what the dawn of the universe was like and the different galactic behaviors that have occurred since then. Sometimes exceptions can help us understand the rule much better. Image of Andromeda (not the galaxy in the article) | Adam Evans In Xataka | These real images were unthinkable before the Webb telescope: they are planets orbiting other stars 130 light years away