James Webb Space Telescope’s Giant Sunshield Test Unit Unfurled First Time

The sunshield test unit on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is unfurled for the first time. Credit: NASA

GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER, MD – The huge Sunshield test unit for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been successfully unfurled for the first time in a key milestone ahead of the launch scheduled for October 2018.

Engineers stacked and expanded the tennis-court sized Sunshield test unit last week inside the cleanroom at a Northrop Grumman facility in Redondo Beach, California.

NASA reports that the operation proceeded perfectly the first time during the test of the full-sized unit.

The Sunshield and every other JWST component must unfold perfectly and to precise tolerances in space because it has not been designed for servicing or repairs by astronaut crews voyaging beyond low-Earth orbit into deep space, William Ochs, Associate Director for JWST at NASA Goddard told me in an exclusive interview.

Artist’s concept of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with Sunshield at bottom.  Credit: NASA/ESA
Artist’s concept of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with Sunshield at bottom. Credit: NASA/ESA

The five layered Sunshield is the largest component of the observatory and acts like a parasol.

Its purpose is to protect Webb from the suns heat and passively cool the telescope and its quartet of sensitive science instruments via permanent shade to approximately 45 kelvins, -380 degrees F, -233 C.

The kite-shaped Sunshield provides an effective sun protection factor or SPF of 1,000,000. By comparison suntan lotion for humans has an SPF of 8 to 40.

Two sides of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Credit: NASA
Two sides of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Credit: NASA

The extreme cold is required for the telescope to function in the infrared (IR) wavelengths and enable it to look back in time further than ever before to detect distant objects.

The shield separates the observatory into a warm sun-facing side and a cold anti-sun side.

Its five thin membrane layers also provides a stable thermal environment to keep the telescopes 18 primary mirror segments properly aligned for Webb’s science investigations.

JWST is the successor to the 24 year old Hubble Space Telescope and will become the most powerful telescope ever sent to space.

The Webb Telescope is a joint international collaborative project between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

NASA has overall responsibility and Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for JWST.

Webb will launch folded up inside the payload fairing of an ESA Ariane V ECA rocket from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana.

In launch configuration, the Sunshield will surround the main mirrors and instruments like an umbrella.

During the post launch journey to the L2 observing orbit at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point nearly a million miles (1.5 million Km) from Earth, the telescopes mirrors and sunshield will begin a rather complex six month long unfolding and calibration process.

The science instruments have been mounted inside the ISIM science module and are currently undergoing critical vacuum chamber testing at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center which provides overall management and systems engineering.

Gold coated flight spare of a JWST primary mirror segment made of beryllium and used for test operations inside the NASA Goddard clean room.  Credit: Ken Kremer- kenkremer.com
Gold coated flight spare of a JWST primary mirror segment made of beryllium and used for test operations inside the NASA Goddard clean room. Credit: Ken Kremer- kenkremer.com

The mirror segments have arrived at NASA Goddard where I’ve had the opportunity to observe and report on work in progress.

Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing JWST, MMS, ISS, Curiosity, Opportunity, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, Boeing, Orion, MAVEN, MOM, Mars and more Earth and Planetary science and human spaceflight news.

Ken Kremer

Sunshield test unit on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is unfurled for the first time at Northrup Grumman.  Credit: NASA
Sunshield test unit on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is unfurled for the first time at Northrup Grumman. Credit: NASA

Powerful Starbursts in Dwarf Galaxies Helped Shape the Early Universe, a New Study Suggests

GOODS field containing distant dwarf galaxies forming stars at an incredible rate. Image Credit: ESO

Massive galaxies in the early Universe formed stars at a much faster clip than they do today — creating the equivalent of a thousand new suns per year. This rate reached its peak 3 billion years after the Big Bang, and by 6 billion years, galaxies had created most of their stars.

New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show that even dwarf galaxies — the small, low mass clusters of several billion stars — produced stars at a rapid rate, playing a bigger role than expected in the early history of the Universe.

Today, we tend to see dwarf galaxies clinging to larger galaxies, or sometimes engulfed within, rather than existing as blazing collections of stars alone. But astronomers have suspected that dwarfs in the early Universe could turn over stars quickly. The trouble is, most images aren’t sharp enough to reveal the faint, faraway galaxies we need to observe.

“We already suspected that dwarf starbursting galaxies would contribute to the early wave of star formation, but this is the first time we’ve been able to measure the effect they actually had,” said lead author Hakim Atek of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in a press release. “They appear to have had a surprisingly significant role to play during the epoch where the Universe formed most of its stars.”

Previous studies of starburst galaxies in the early Universe were biased toward massive galaxies, leaving out the huge number of dwarf galaxies that existed in this era. But the highly sensitive capabilities of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 have now allowed astronomers to peer at low-mass dwarf galaxies in the distant Universe.

This image represents the data that comes from using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescop's highly-sensitive Wide Field Camera 3 in its grism spectroscopy mode. A grism is a combination of a grating and a prism, and it splits up the light from a galaxy into its constituent colours, producing a spectrum. In this image the continuum of each galaxy is shown as a "rainbow". Astronomers can look at a galaxy’s spectrum and identify light emitted by the hydrogen gas in the galaxy. If there are stars being formed in the galaxy then the intense radiation from the newborn stars heats up the hydrogen gas and makes it glow. All of the light from the hydrogen gas is emitted in a small number of very narrow and bright emission lines. For dwarf galaxies in the early Universe the emission lines are much easier to detect than the faint, almost invisible, continuum.  Image Credit: NASA and ESA
This image represents the data that comes from using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s highly-sensitive Wide Field Camera 3 in its grism spectroscopy mode. Image Credit: NASA / ESA

Atek and colleagues looked at 1000 galaxies from roughly three billion years to 10 billion years after the Big Bang. They dug through their data, in search of the H-alpha line: a deep-red visible spectral line, which occurs when a hydrogen electron falls from its third to second lowest energy level.

In star forming regions, the surrounding gas is continually ionized by radiation from the newly formed stars. Once the gas is ionized, the nucleus and removed electron can recombine to form a new hydrogen atom with the electron typically in a higher energy state. This electron will then cascade back to the ground state, a process that produces H-alpha emission about half the time.

So the H-alpha line is an effective probe of star formation and the brightness of the H-alpha line (which is much easier to detect than the faint, almost invisible, continuum) is an effective probe of the star formation rate. From this single line, Attek and colleagues found that the rate at which stars are turning on in early dwarfs is surprisingly high.

“These galaxies are forming stars so quickly that they could actually double their entire mass of stars in only 150 million years — this sort of gain in stellar mass would take most normal galaxies 1-3 billion years,” said co-author Jean-Paul Kneib, also of EPFL.

The team doesn’t yet know why these small galaxies are producing such a vast number of stars. In general, bursts of star formation are thought to follow somewhat chaotic events like galactic mergers or the shock of a supernova. But by continuing to study these dwarf galaxies, astronomers hope to shed light on galactic evolution and help paint a consistent picture of events in the early Universe.

The paper has been published today in the Astrophysical Journal and may be viewed here. The latest Hubblecast (below) also covers this exciting result.

The New and Improved Hubble Ultra Deep Field

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field seen in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI)

It’s perhaps one of the most famous images in astronomy. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field displays nearly 10,000 galaxies across the observable Universe in both visible and near-infrared light. The smallest, reddest galaxies are among the youngest known, existing when the Universe was just 800 million years old.

But now, with the addition of ultraviolet light the renowned image is even better than ever.

“We’ve taken new observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and made a new image of this very famous region of the sky — the Hubble Ultra Deep Field — which gives us one of the most comprehensive pictures of galaxy evolution ever obtained,” said Harry Teplitz from Caltech, in a talk presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston today.

The image has undoubtedly captured the minds of amateurs and provided astronomers with a wealth of data, from which to study galaxies in their most primitive stages.

But there was a caveat: without ultraviolet light, which tells us about the youngest and hottest stars, there was a significant gap in our understanding of these forming galaxies. Between 5 and 10 billion light-years away from us — corresponding to a time period when most of the stars in the Universe were born — we were left in the dark.

Compare the new image to an older version:

The original Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (Credit NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team).
The original Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (Credit NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team).

Now, with the addition of ultraviolet data to the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, astronomers can see unobscured regions of star formation throughout this time period. It will help us understand how galaxies grew in size from small collections of very hot stars — now visible across the observable Universe — to the elegant structures we see today.

Here’s a ‘pan and zoom’ video version of the new image:

For more information on the new and improved Ultra Deep Field, check out the HubbleSite.

Saturn Aurora Sparkles In New Hubble Images

Several images of an aurora on Saturn's north pole taken in April and May 2013 by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA, Acknowledgement: J. Nichols (University of Leicester)

It’s amazing to see what some flashes of light can tell us. New images the Hubble Space Telescope took of Saturn not only reveal auroras dancing in the north pole, but also reveal some interesting things about the giant planet’s magnetic field.

“It appears that when particles from the Sun hit Saturn, the magnetotail collapses and later reconfigures itself, an event that is reflected in the dynamics of its auroras,” the European Space Agency wrote in a description of the image.

“Saturn was caught during a very dynamic light show – some of the bursts of light seen shooting around Saturn’s polar regions traveled more than three times faster than the speed of the gas giant’s roughly 10-hour rotation period.”

And for those readers that remember the music video from Saturn that the Cassini spacecraft took — also of auroras — ESA said this new research complements what the other spacecraft did, too.

The research has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.

Source: ESA

Celebrate Hubble’s 24th Birthday by Flying Through the Pillars and Peaks of the Monkey Head Nebula

With the Hubble Space Telescope on board, Discovery begins its roll maneuver after liftoff from Kennedy Space Center on April 24, 1990. Credit: NASA.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched 24 years ago last week, and this newly released video is a birthday present of sorts — to us!

Here you can fly into the Monkey Head Nebula (also known as NGC 2174), and this video showcases both visible and infrared light views of a collection of pillars along one edge of the nebula. The sequence begins with a view of the night sky near the constellation of Gemini and Orion, then zooms through a region of of pillars and peaks of dust.

Then comes a cross-fade transitions between Hubble’s visible and infrared light views, and it also takes you from a two-dimensional image to a three-dimensional sculpted model of the region. The camera then pulls back to reveal the landscape of evaporating peaks of gas and dust surrounded by stars.

The folks at the HubbleSite say that this visualization is intended to be a reasonable interpretation (not scientifically accurate) and that distances within the model are significantly compressed.

New Hubble View Shows Objects a Billion Times Fainter Than Your Eyes Can See

This 14-hour exposure from the Hubble Space Telescope zooms in on a galaxy cluster and shows objects around a billion times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye. Credit: NASA/ESA.
Hubble’s images might look flat, but this one shows a remarkable depth of field that lets us see more than halfway to the edge of the observable Universe. Credit: NASA/ESA.

While this image isn’t as deep as the Hubble Deep Field, this 14-hour exposure by the Hubble Space Telescope shows objects around a billion times fainter than what can be seen with the human eyes alone. Astronomers say this image also offers a remarkable depth of field that lets us see more than halfway to the edge of the observable Universe.

As well, this image also provides an extraordinary cross-section of the Universe in both distance and age, showing objects at different distances and stages in cosmic history, and ranges from some of our nearest neighbors to objects seen in the early years of the Universe.

Annotated image of the field around CLASS B1608+656. Credit: NASA/ESA.
Annotated image of the field around CLASS B1608+656. Credit: NASA/ESA.

Most of the galaxies visible here are members of a huge cluster called CLASS B1608+656, which lies about five billion light-years away. But the field also contains other objects, both significantly closer and far more distant, including quasar QSO-160913+653228 which is so distant its light has taken nine billion years to reach us, two thirds of the time that has elapsed since the Big Bang.

Since the Hubble Deep Field combined 10 days of exposure and the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF was assembled by combining ten years of observations (with over 2 million seconds of exposure time), this image at 14 hours of exposure may seem “small.” But it shows the power of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Also of note is that this image was “found” in the Hubble Hidden Treasures vault — where members of the public are able to search Hubble’s science for the best overlooked images that have never been seen by a general audience. This image of CLASS B1608+656 has been well-studied by scientists over the years, but this is the first time it has been published in full online.

Take a zooming view through the image in the video below and read more about this image here.

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Source: Hubble ESA

Three NASA Telescopes Begin Hunt For Earliest Galaxies

A grouping of galaxies, known as J0717 (center) is visible in this Spitzer Space Telescope image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/P. Capak (Caltech)

Talk about turning back time. Three NASA observatories — the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope — are all working together to look for the universe’s first galaxies. The project is called “Frontier Fields” and aims to examine these galaxies through a technique called gravitational lensing, which allows astronomers to peer at more distant objects when massive objects in front bend their light.

“Our overall science goal with the Frontier Fields is to understand how the first galaxies in the universe assembled,” stated Peter Capak, a research scientist with the NASA/JPL Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology and the Spitzer lead for the Frontier Fields.

“This pursuit is made possible by how massive galaxy clusters warp space around them, kind of like when you look through the bottom of a wine glass.”

Using the three observatories allows investigators to peer at the galaxies in different light wavelengths (namely, infrared for Spitzer, shorter infrared and optical for Hubble, and X-rays for Chandra). The teams also plan to learn more about how the foreground clusters influence the “warping” of the galaxies behind.

The Hubble and Spitzer telescopes are designed to locate where the galaxies are (and if they are indeed early galaxies) while Chandra can map out the X-ray emissions to better determine the galaxies’ masses. An early example of this project at work was examination of Abell 2744, which yielded a distant find: Abell2744 Y1, one of the earliest known galaxies, which was born about 650 million years after the Big Bang.

Source: California Institute Of Technology

Hubble Telescope Watches Asteroid Disintegrate in Space

This series of images shows the asteroid P/2013 R3 breaking apart, as viewed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. This is the first time that such a body has been seen to undergo this kind of break-up. Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA).

Back in 2010, astronomers discovered an asteroid that was breaking apart due to a head-on collision with another asteroid. But now they have seen an asteroid break apart – with no recent collision required.

Asteroid P/2013 R3 appears to be crumbling apart in space, and astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope recently saw the asteroid breaking into as many as 10 smaller pieces. The best explanation for the break-up is the Yarkovsky–O’Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack (YORP) effect, a subtle effect from sunlight that can change the asteroid’s rotation rate and basically cause a rubbly-type asteroid to spin apart.

“This is a really bizarre thing to observe — we’ve never seen anything like it before,” said co-author Jessica Agarwal of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany. “The break-up could have many different causes, but the Hubble observations are detailed enough that we can actually pinpoint the process responsible.”

Astronomers first noticed this asteroid on September 15, 2013 and it appeared as a weird, fuzzy-looking object, as seen by the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky-survey telescopes. A follow-up observation on Oct. 1 with the W.M. Keck telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea revealed three co-moving bodies embedded in a dusty envelope that is nearly the diameter of Earth.

Then on October 29, 2013, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the object and saw there were actually 10 embedded objects, each with comet-like dust tails. The four largest rocky fragments are up to 200 meters/yards in radius, about twice the length of a football field.

The Hubble data showed that the fragments are drifting away from each other at a leisurely pace of 1.6 km/hr (one mile per hour), which would be slower than a strolling human.

“Seeing this rock fall apart before our eyes is pretty amazing,” said David Jewitt, from UCLA’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, who led the investigation.

The slowness of the speed at which the pieces are coming apart makes it unlikely that the asteroid is disintegrating because of a collision. That would be instantaneous and violent, with the pieces traveling away from each other at much higher speeds.

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Jewitt also said the asteroid is not coming unglued due to the pressure of interior ices warming and vaporizing, like comets do as they approach the Sun. The asteroid is too cold for ices to significantly sublimate, and it has presumably maintained its nearly 480 million-km (300 million–mile) distance from the Sun for much of its life.

Jewitt described the YORP torque effect as like grapes on a stem being gently pulled apart due to centrifugal force of an unusually shaped asteroid as it speeds up in its spin. This effect occurs when light from the Sun is absorbed by a body and then re-emitted as heat. When the shape of the emitting body is not perfectly regular, more heat is emitted from some regions than others. This creates a small imbalance that causes a small but constant torque on the body, which changes its spin rate. This effect has been discussed by scientists for several years but, so far, never reliably observed.

For the break-up to happen, P/2013 R3 must have a weak, fractured interior, probably as the result of previous but ancient collisions with other asteroids. Most small asteroids, in fact, are thought to have been severely damaged in this way, giving them a “rubble pile” internal structure. P/2013 R3 itself is probably the product of collisional shattering of a bigger body some time in the last billion years.

With Hubble’s recent discovery of an a different active asteroid spouting six tails (P/2013 P5), astronomers are seeing more circumstantial evidence that the pressure of sunlight may be the primary force that disintegrates small asteroids (less than a mile across) in the Solar System.

The asteroid’s remnant debris, estimated at weighing in at 200,000 tons, in the future will provide a rich source of meteoroids, Jewitt said. Most will eventually plunge into the sun, but a small fraction of the debris may one day enter the Earth’s atmosphere to blaze across the sky as meteors, he said.

The discovery is published online March 6 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. A preprint of the paper can be found here.

Sources: UCLA, Hubble ESA

Is Eta Carinae Heading Toward Another Eruption?

Eta Car

Massive stars can devastate their surroundings, unleashing hot winds and blasting radiation. With a mass over 100 times heavier than the Sun and a luminosity a million times brighter than the Sun, Eta Carinae clocks in as one of the biggest and brightest stars in our galaxy.

The enigmatic object walks a thin line between stellar stability and tumultuous explosions. But now a team of international astronomers is growing concerned that it’s leaning toward instability and eruption.

In the 19th Century the star mysteriously threw off unusually bright light for two decades in an event that became known as the “Great Eruption,” the causes of which are still up for debate. John Herschel and others watched as Eta Carinae’s brightness oscillated around that of Vega — rivaling a supernova explosion.

We now know the star ejected material in the form of two big globes. “During the eruption the star threw off more than 10 solar masses, which can now be observed as the surrounding bipolar nebula,” said lead author Dr. Andrea Mehner from the European Southern Observatory. Miraculously the star survived, but the nebula has been expanding into space ever since.

Eta Carinae has been observed at the South African Astronomical Observatory — a 0.75m telescope outside of Cape Town — for more than 40 years, providing a wealth of data. From the start of observations in 1976 until 1998, astronomers saw an increase across the J, H, K and L bands — filters, which allow certain wavelength ranges of infrared light to pass through.

“This data set is unique for its consistency over a timespan of more than 40 years,” Mehner told Universe Today. “It provides us with the opportunity to analyze long-term changes in the system as Eta Carinae still recovers from its Great Eruption.”

In order to understand the longterm overall increase in light we have to look at a more recent discovery noted in 2005 when scientists discovered that Eta Carinae is actually two stars: a massive blue star and a smaller companion. The temperature increased for 15 years until the companion came very close to the massive star, reaching periastron.

This increase in brightness is likely due to an overall increase in temperature of some component of the Eta Carinae system (which includes the massive blue star, its smaller companion, and the shells of gas and dust that now enshroud the system).

After 1998, however, the linear trend changed significantly and the star’s brightness increased much more rapidly in the J and H bands. It’s getting bluer, which in astronomy, typically means it’s getting hotter.

However, it’s unlikely the star itself is getting hotter. Instead we are seeing the effect of dust around the star being destroyed rapidly. Dust absorbs blue light. So if the dust is getting destroyed, more blue light will be able to pass through the nebulous globes surrounding the system. If this is the case, then we’re really seeing the star as it truly is, without dust absorbing certain wavelengths of its light.

While the nebula is slowly expanding and the dust is therefore dissipating, the authors do not think it’s enough to account for the recent brightening. Instead Eta Carinae is likely rotating at a different speed or losing mass at a different rate. “The changes observed may imply that the star is becoming more unstable and may head towards another eruptive phase,” Mehner told Universe Today.

Perhaps Eta Carinae is heading toward another “Great Eruption.” Only time will tell. But in a field where most events occur on a timescale of millions of years, it’s a great opportunity to watch the system evolve on a human time scale. And when Eta Carinae reaches periastron in the middle of this year, tens of telescopes will be collecting its light, hoping to see a sudden turn of events that may help us explain this exotic system.

The paper has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available for download here.

Greedy Galaxies Gobbled Gas, Stalling Star Formation Billions Of Years Ago

Arp 147 contains a spiral galaxy (right) that collided with an elliptical galaxy (left), triggering a wave of star formation. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/S.Rappaport et al, Optical: NASA/STScI

Like millionaires that burn through their cash too quickly, astronomers have found one factor behind why compact elliptical galaxies stopped growing stars about 11 billion years ago: they ate through their gas reserves.

The revelation comes as researchers released a new evolutionary track for compact elliptical galaxies that stopped their star formation when the universe was just three billion years old. When these galaxies ran out of gas, some of them cannibalized smaller galaxies to create giant elliptical galaxies. The “burned-out”galaxies have stars crowding 10 to 100 times more densely than elliptical galaxies formed more recently through a different evolutionary track.

“We at last show how these compact galaxies can form, how it happened, and when it happened. This basically is the missing piece in the understanding of how the most massive galaxies formed, and how they evolved into the giant ellipticals of today,” stated Sune Toft, who led the study and is a researcher at the Dark Cosmology Center at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

“This had been a great mystery for many years, because just three billion years after the Big Bang we see that half of the most massive galaxies have already completed their star formation.”

How massive elliptical galaxies evolved in about 13 billion years. Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Toft (Niels Bohr Institute), and A. Feild (STScI)
How massive elliptical galaxies evolved in about 13 billion years. Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Toft (Niels Bohr Institute), and A. Feild (STScI)

The team got a snapshot of these galaxies’ evolution by looking at a representative sample with the Hubble Space Telescope, specifically through the Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and a spectroscopic survey called 3D-HST. To find out how old the stars were, they combined the Hubble work with data gathered from the  Spitzer Space Telescope and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

Next, they examined ancient, fast-star-forming submillimeter galaxies with data gathered from a range of space and ground-based telescopes.

The Hubble Space Telescope. image credit: NASA, tweaked by D. Majaess.
The Hubble Space Telescope. image credit: NASA, tweaked by D. Majaess.

“This multi-spectral information, stretching from optical light through submillimeter wavelengths, yielded a full suite of information about the sizes, stellar masses, star-formation rates, dust content, and precise distances of the dust-enshrouded galaxies that were present early in the universe,” Hubble’s news center stated.

The group found that that the submillimeter galaxies were likely “progenitors” of compact elliptical galaxies, as they share predicted characteristics of the ancestors. Further, researchers calculated that starbursts in submillimeter galaxies only went on for about 40 million years before the galaxies ran out of gas.

You can read the results in the Feb. 20 edition of the Astrophysical Journal or in prepublished version in Arxiv.

Source: Hubble News Center