{"id":36944,"date":"2022-10-04T08:21:06","date_gmt":"2022-10-04T08:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skyatnightmagazine.com\/?p=112477"},"modified":"2022-10-04T08:38:10","modified_gmt":"2022-10-04T08:38:10","slug":"leftover-galaxy-nuggets-could-reveal-the-secrets-of-the-early-universe","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/rss_feed\/leftover-galaxy-nuggets-could-reveal-the-secrets-of-the-early-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"Leftover galaxy \u2018nuggets\u2019 could reveal the secrets of the early Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>

By Chris Lintott\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 04 October 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

\n\n

W<\/span>ith the continued arrival of more of the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope<\/a>, astronomers have been spending a lot of time staring at red blobs, trying to make sense of galaxy formation.<\/p>\n

While we wait for the dust to settle in the race to find the most redshifted<\/a> systems, to locate the \u2018furthest ever known galaxy\u2019, a team of astronomers led by Krzysztof Lisiecki in Poland have been paying attention to red systems a little closer to home.<\/p>\n

\"""\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
Galaxy Markarian 1216, observed in X-ray light by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, is an elliptical that may have descended from a \u2018red nugget\u2019 galaxy. Credit: X-ray: NASA\/CXC\/Univ. of CA Irvine\/D. Buote<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

Using data from the VIMOS spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope, they have identified a set of nearby \u2018red nugget\u2019 galaxies<\/a>, the local equivalent of a class of system first discovered in the early Universe.<\/span><\/p>\n

The nuggets deserve their name, being compact and often massive galaxies, with a red colour that reveals an absence of ongoing star formation<\/a> (which would produce a sprinkling of bright blue stars).<\/span><\/p>\n

Previous work has shown that in the early Universe such systems shine brightly in X-ray, an indication of activity around their supermassive black holes<\/a> that might account for the lack of star formation.<\/span><\/p>\n

These jewel-like systems are important because they\u2019re thought to merge to make the giant elliptical galaxies we see in local clusters such as the Virgo Cluster<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"""\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
A deep image of the Virgo Cluster captured by the Burrell Schmidt telescope. Credit: Chris Mihos (Case Western Reserve University)\/ESO<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

But studying small, distant systems that are hard to resolve makes it difficult to test that theory.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the team set out to find local leftover nuggets that may have survived to the present day.<\/p>\n

They started with 90,000 galaxies observed by the VLT, picking out those that are massive, small and red.<\/p>\n

That sounds simple, but each decision made can change the nature of the final collection of galaxies.<\/p>\n

As an example, the team agonise especially over the definition of \u2018compact\u2019.<\/p>\n

We know that red nuggets seem to be especially dense, with plenty of stars packed into a small system, but no one has managed to agree how to translate that into an agreed standard.<\/p>\n

\"""\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
Solitary, middle-aged loners, \u2018red nuggets\u2019 are leftovers of the early Universe. Credit: X-ray: NASA\/CXC\/MTA-E\u00f6tv\u00f6s University\/N. Werner et al., Illustration: NASA\/CXC\/M. Weiss<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

The researchers are conservative, keeping only the most nuggety of systems, but that means the result of all that work was a sample of just 77 new nuggets, with redshifts that indicate their light has been travelling towards us for more than six billion years, nearly half the lifetime of the Universe.<\/p>\n

These new systems thus belong to the Universe\u2019s middle age, and there are fewer of them than at the peak of star formation and galaxy assembly four billion years earlier.<\/p>\n

If these are the ingredients from which massive elliptical galaxies are made, then the stars in such systems must have formed a long time ago.<\/p>\n

\"""\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
At the centre of this image is an elliptical galaxy, the brightest member of galaxy cluster Abell 2261. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), T. Lauer (National Optical Astronomy Observatory, USA), and the CLASH team.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

The most important clue as to the fate of these galaxies is their environments: are they found in massive galaxy clusters<\/a>, or in the empty voids between such structures?<\/p>\n

The answer to that question will have to wait for a little while, as the team are still working on it, but the sample they\u2019ve already assembled is unique.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure they\u2019re not the only ones who will be looking at this new collection of red gems scattered across the southern sky.<\/p>\n

Chris Lintott<\/span> was reading <\/span><\/em>The First Catalogue of Spectroscopically Confirmed Red Nuggets at z~0.7 from the VIPERS Survey. Linking High-z Red Nuggets and Local Relics by Krzysztof Lisiecki et al.\u00a0Read it online at: arxiv.org\/abs\/2208.04601<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of <\/strong><\/em>BBC Sky at Night Magazine<\/strong>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/body><\/html>\n

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