Astronomers discover a galaxy frozen in time for billions of years: 'Fossil galaxies are like the dinosaurs of the universe'
Astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy that is a "cosmic fossil" which has remained "frozen in time" for billions of years.
Just as dinosaur fossils here on Earth are used to probe the evolution of life, this cosmic fossil in the form of the galaxy KiDS J0842+0059 could be used to understand cosmic evolution.
A cosmic fossil is a galaxy that has managed to remain unchanged by collisions and interactions with other galaxies. That means they can act as pristine time capsules to help astronomers study earlier galaxies.
Recent research conducted using data from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) has revealed that this galaxy has remained unchanged for around 7 billion years.
"We have discovered a galaxy that has been 'perfectly preserved' for billions of years, a true archaeological find that tells us how the first galaxies were born and helps us understand how the universe has evolved to this day," team co-leader and National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) researcher Crescenzo Dove said in a statement.
"Fossil galaxies are like the dinosaurs of the universe: studying them allows us to understand in which environmental conditions they formed and how the most massive galaxies we see today evolved."
KiDS J0842+0059, located 3 billion light-years away from Earth, was discovered in 2018 by the KiDS (Kilo Degree Survey).
Images of the galaxy provided by the Very Large Telescope Survey Telescope (VST) allowed astronomers to measure the size and mass of KiDS J0842+0059. These measurements were perfected by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its X-Shooter instrument.
This revealed that KiDS J0842+0059 has a stellar mass of around one hundred billion times that of the sun, but is more compact than similar mass galaxies. It was also discovered that KiDS J0842+0059 has lacked star formation for much of its life. All this hinted toward it being a fossil galaxy.
To remove uncertainties around the characteristics of KiDS J0842+0059, particularly its size and structure, this team set about using the adaptive optics system of the LBT to get sharper images of this relic galaxy. This resulted in images with ten times the detail of the KiDS provided images.
"Data from the LBT have allowed us to confirm that KiDS J0842+0059 is indeed compact and therefore a true galaxy relic with a shape similar to NGC 1277 and the compact galaxies we observe in the early stages of the universe," team member Chiara Spiniello, a researcher at the University of Oxford, said. "This is the first time that we have been able to do this with such high-resolution data for a galaxy relic so far away."
NGC 1277 is another example of a rare stunted galactic fossil, which is located in the Perseus Cluster around 240 million light-years away, meaning it is much closer to home than KiDS J0842+0059.
The fact that there are galaxies like NGC 1277 and KiDS J0842+0059 out there indicates some galaxies can form rapidly, stay compact and remain dormant for billions of years by dodging collisions with other galaxies.
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"Studying these cosmic fossils helps us reconstruct the formation history of the nuclei of today's massive galaxies, which — unlike relic galaxies — have undergone fusion processes, accreting matter right around those first compact galaxies from which they originated," Tortora said. "With cutting-edge technologies such as adaptive optics and the support of telescopes such as the LBT, we can improve our understanding of this type of galaxy.
"In the near future, we will take a step forward, aiming to search for, confirm, and study new relic galaxies through the unique quality and high-resolution data of the Euclid space telescope."
The team's research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Fossil galaxies are crucial because they are a direct link to the massive galaxy population that existed billions of years ago, said Michele Cappellari, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the study. 'As 'living fossils,' they have avoided the chaotic mergers and growth that most other massive galaxies have experienced. Studying them allows us to reconstruct the conditions of the universe in its infancy and understand the initial bursts of star formation,' he said. What caused these galaxies to stop forming stars so abruptly is a major question, he added. 'Evidence from both local and (distant) observations suggests that feedback from supermassive black holes may be responsible,' Cappellari said. 'These black holes can produce powerful winds that expel or heat the gas in a galaxy, preventing further star formation. However, this remains an active area of research.' Scientists initially identified KiDS J0842+0059 in 2018 using the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. That observation revealed that the galaxy was populated by very old stars but only provided an estimate of its mass and size, so a more detailed observation was required to confirm it was a relic. The Large Binocular Telescope used for this confirmation can render very sharp images due to its ability to compensate for atmospheric turbulence, which otherwise can make it difficult for Earth-based telescopes to focus on distant objects. The newly found fossil galaxy joins a group of only a handful of others that have been observed at the same level of detail, the most pristine of which — called NGC 1277 — was confirmed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018. NGC 1277 and KiDS J0842+0059 are very similar, but the latter is much farther away from Earth. It fits the definition of fossil galaxy almost perfectly, according to Spiniello. 'This is what we call an extreme relic,' she said, 'because almost all, or 99.5% of its stars were formed incredibly early on in cosmic time, and the galaxy did absolutely nothing thereafter.' The fossil galaxy has stars and planets, just like our own galaxy, but it is much more dense, Spiniello added. 'There will be many more stars in a tiny, tiny volume, so it'll be super crowded,' she said. 'And it will be much harder to find solar systems like ours, with many planets orbiting around it, just because of the chances of getting companion stars interfering nearby.' KiDS J0842+0059 looks to observers like it did 3 billion years ago, because that's how long it takes for the light coming from the galaxy to reach Earth. Spiniello hypothesized that the relic will likely remain as it is forever, but scientists can't be certain since they still don't know what keeps it from interacting with other galaxies. 'There must be something that prevents them from merging, but without knowing what, we cannot really predict what's going to happen in the future,' Spiniello said. It is very hard to identify fossil galaxies and confirm their nature, partly because they're relatively rare and small compared with regular galaxies such as the Milky Way, according to Sébastien Comerón, an extragalactic astronomer at the Universidad de La Laguna and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain. The confirmation of a distant relic galaxy is a credit to the search strategies used to identify these objects and of modern instruments, he said. 'Relic galaxies are mysterious,' added Comerón, who was not involved with the study, in an email. 'The fact that a few galaxies are nowadays untouched relics of the first large galaxies needs an explanation.' Astronomers can't say for certain how rare relics are, but Spiniello estimates there might be 'one in millions' among all the galaxies in the universe. The INSPIRE project — which aims to find and catalogue fossil galaxies and spawned the discovery of KiDS J0842+0059 — has already identified several dozen other candidates that are in the pipeline for further scrutiny, Spiniello said. Discover your world Go beyond the headlines and explore the latest scientific achievements and fascinating discoveries. Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. New instruments could make this search even more effective. Both Spiniello and Tortora are excited about Euclid, a European Space Agency telescope launched in 2023 with the goal of exploring dark matter and dark energy that will also be useful for observing fossil galaxies. 'Euclid will be transformational,' Spiniello said, 'because rather than observing one single object at a time, its wide sky survey configuration will cover a lot more. The idea is to find all the galaxies in a patch of sky, and then isolate all the ones that are ultra compact. And if you do that, then you can actually estimate how rare (fossil galaxies) are.' Confirming relic galaxy KiDS J0842+0059 at such a distance is a remarkable achievement, and the future of this field is very promising, Cappellari said in an email. 'With powerful new telescopes like James Webb and Euclid (which produced its first images just a few months ago), and on the ground with advanced adaptive optics, we can expect to find and study more of these relics at even greater distances.'
