* Astronomy

Ancient Dead Galaxy Sets New Record

An international team of astronomers has, for the first time, spotted a massive, inactive galaxy from a time when the Universe was only 1.65 billion years old. This rare discovery, made using the world-class W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, could change the way scientists think about the evolution of galaxies.
The researchers found that within a short time period this massive galaxy, known as ZF-COSMOS-20115, formed all of its stars (three to five times more than our Milky Way today) through an extreme star-burst event.
But it stopped forming stars only a billion years after the Big Bang to become a quiescent or 'red and dead' galaxy - common in our Universe today, but not expected to exist at this ancient epoch.
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