Super-Galaxies Do Not Become Cannibals Until Later In Life

The vast black dimension that seems to be endless and less unexplored is seemingly getting fed as time goes by. Massive galaxies grow through swallowing recycled gas in space. The evolution of galaxies shows how progressive is the activity happening in the vast space.

According to Astronomy Magazine, before they turn to cannibalism, massive galaxies spend their infancy gobbling up recycled gas from earlier generations of star formation.

Spiderweb Galaxy is a progressive growing galaxy. The life span is indefinite and will continue to expand in indefinite time. In such time, it will be a gigantic elliptical galaxy at the heart of a galactic cluster.

Spiderweb Galaxy is a group of dozen small proto-galaxies, gradually coming together and combining galaxies into a larger radio galaxy. Spiderweb Galaxy gives astronomers a glimpse into the formative years of the Gargantuan galaxies in the universe.

Scientists disocvered that the largest galaxies in the universe grow through cosmic clouds of cold gas. This finding, which was made possible using radio telescopes in Australia and the USA, is published today in the journal Science.

Previous studies had made some unknown appearance of thousands of millions of young stars in the Spiderweb to be more visible evidence of the galaxy growth. This discovery gave the reason for the studies that galaxy condensed directly from the cloud of cold gas.

On the EurekAlert news, instead of observing the hydrogen directly, the researchers did so using carbon monoxide, a tracer gas that is much easier to detect. "It is surprising how cold this gas is, at some 200 degrees below zero Celsius," comments Matthew Lehnert, second author of the article and researcher at the Astrophysics Institute of Paris. "We would have expected a lot of collapsing galaxies, which would have heated the gas, and for that reason we thought that the carbon monoxide would be much more difficult to detect."

It has been widely accepted that as a vast galaxy forms, it pulls in gases, elements and other materials from nearby smaller galaxies, cannibalizing them to feed its own growth. That is because scientists have mostly been observing less distant, more mature super-galaxies that the Spiderweb Galaxy offers a look at much earlier stages of a super-galaxy's lifespan.