The VISTA telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has discovered more than 500 massive galaxies that were born during the infancy of the universe and that have not been found until now. Thanks to VISTA data, astronomers have been able to know when and how these gigantic assemblages of stars, planets, gas clouds, cosmic dust, dark matter and energy, that make up galaxies, emerged.
The more distant and weaker a galaxy is, the more complex it is to find it and therefore study and analyze it; Those that in theory should be easier to observe, the brightest and most massive galaxies, are very rare and, finally, the most frequent but also less bright galaxies are, for this circumstance, much more difficult to detect. All this together greatly complicates our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies.
However, thanks to the work of a team of astronomers led by Karina Caputi, from the Kapteyn Institute of Astronomy at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and the analysis of the images from the UltraVISTA survey (which has been capturing photographs of the same area of the sky since December 2009) combined with observations from NASA’s Spitzer telescope, we have found a sizeable group of distant and massive galaxies that had not been previously detected.
“ We discovered 574 new massive galaxies, the largest sample of this type of hidden galaxies from the early universe ever collected. Studying them allows us to answer a simple but important question: when did the first massive galaxies appear?”, Explains Karina Caputi, leader of the study.
According to the data of the work, most of the massive galaxies that we see in the nearby universe, formed only 3,000 million years after the Big Bang and were more abundant than previously believed , which contradicts current models of galaxy evolution. that do not predict the existence of such gigantic galaxies in the early universe period.
