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The Wild Early Lives of Today’s Most Massive Galaxies
Dramatic star formation cut short by black holes
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1206/
25 January 2012
Using the APEX telescope, a team of astronomers has found the strongest link so far between the most powerful bursts of star formation in the early Universe, and the most massive galaxies found today. The galaxies, flowering with dramatic starbursts in the early Universe, saw the birth of new stars abruptly cut short, leaving them as massive but passive galaxies of aging stars in the present day. The astronomers also have a likely culprit for the sudden end to the starbursts: the emergence of supermassive black holes.
Astronomers have combined observations from the LABOCA camera on the ESO-operated 12-metre Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope [1] with measurements made with ESOs Very Large Telescope, NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope, and others, to look at the way that bright, distant galaxies are gathered together in groups or clusters.
The more closely the galaxies are clustered, the more massive are their halos of dark matter the invisible material that makes up the vast majority of a galaxys mass. The new results are the most accurate clustering measurements ever made for this type of galaxy.
There, we have that out of the way...