New Hubble find challenges our ideas about galaxies

Objects in the distant universe appear small and difficult to see – unless they’re sitting behind a cosmic magnifying glass. That’s exactly the case for MACS 2129-1, a galaxy lensed by a massive foreground galaxy cluster. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have managed to catch a glimpse of this unusual object, which appears to be an old, “dead” galaxy that’s already stopped making new stars just a few billion years after the Big Bang. Not only is this galaxy finished with its star formation earlier than expected, it’s also shaped like a disk, rather than the fuzzy ball of stars that astronomers assumed they’d see.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

New Hubble find challenges our ideas about galaxies

Objects in the distant universe appear small and difficult to see – unless they’re sitting behind a cosmic magnifying glass. That’s exactly the case for MACS 2129-1, a galaxy lensed by a massive foreground galaxy cluster. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have managed to catch a glimpse of this unusual object, which appears to be an old, “dead” galaxy that’s already stopped making new stars just a few billion years after the Big Bang. Not only is this galaxy finished with its star formation earlier than expected, it’s also shaped like a disk, rather than the fuzzy ball of stars that astronomers assumed they’d see.

more…

So, a galaxy with progeria?

> it’s also shaped like a disk

I disagree. There are two irregularities in the disk shape, a low intensity patch 2/3 of the way along the main disk and an outlier, that argue that the disk-like shape is an optical illusion that depends on the direction we happen to be looking.

I’d need to see more examples of this before I called it an elliptical.