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An International Team of Astronomers Led by UMass Amherst May Have Just Found One of the Missing Links in Galaxy Evolution
A team of 48 astronomers from 14 countries, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has discovered a population of dusty, star-forming galaxies at the far edges of the universe that formed only a billion years after the Big Bang, believed to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago.
Astronomers Find one of the Oldest Barred-Spiral Galaxies in the Universe
Research led by Daniel Ivanov, who earned his undergraduate degree at UMass Amherst studying under Professor of Astronomy Mauro Giavalisco and is now a physics and astronomy graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, has uncovered a contender for one of the earliest observed spiral galaxies containing a stellar bar – a sometimes-striking visual feature that can play an important role in the evolution of a galaxy.
Giavalisco, as well as Yingjie Cheng, who received her doctorate in astronomy from UMass Amherst, and John Weaver, who completed a postdoc in UMass Amherst’s astronomy department, are all co-authors of the new research, which helps constrain the timeframe in which bars could have first emerged in the universe. Analysis of light from the galaxy, called COSMOS-74706, places it on the cosmic timeline at about 11.5 billion years ago.