Astronomers Found a 'Benjamin Button' Galaxy
Photo: MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images (Getty Images)
At 1.2 billion years young, the galaxy ALESS 073.1 should have the chaotic look of a youthful galaxy—a fledging, diffuse group of stars and gas suspended in the early universe. Instead, this primordial starburst galaxy has a central bulge and rotating belt that makes it look billions of years older. This odd corner of the universe was recently imaged by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.
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An international team of astronomers dug into the nascent galaxy’s rapid development in a recent analysis published in the journal Scientific Reports. They found ALESS’s age to be less than 10% the current age of the universe, but parts of its structure indicate a much older entity. Specifically, the presence of a bulge in the galaxy’s center and a rotating disc surrounding that center, feature that astronomers have historically only seen in galaxies that have had more time to form, on the scale of billions of years.