Hubble Space Telescope Reveals Six Dead Galaxies

NASA's Hubble Telescope has discovered six dead galaxies in deep space, the US Space Agency website reported. They were named MRG-M1341, MRG-M0138, MRG-M2129, MRG-M0150, MRG-M0454 and MRG-M1423. The question of why 11 billion years ago these galaxies ran out of gas remains open.

“At this point in our Universe, all galaxies should form many stars. This is the peak epoch of star formation, the authors of the discovery, astronomers at the University of Massachusetts, said in a statement. - What happened? Has a supermassive black hole turned on in the center of galaxies that heated all the gas? If so, the gas may still be there, but it is hot right now. It is also possible that galaxies have used up their entire supply of gas. Here are the questions that we hope to find answers to through future observations. It is likely that these galaxies will never recover, even if other galaxies shine nearby, waking up dead galaxies and causing them to start creating stars again”.

In their search, astronomers used the technique of gravitational lensing, which is used when a massive galaxy or a cluster of galaxies bends the light emitted from a more distant galaxy. This makes it possible to obtain a highly magnified, albeit distorted image and find the most distant, most massive and earliest galaxies that have ceased their star formation.