Something stole this galaxy's spin 12 billion years ago

By Dr. Becky

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JWST just found a galaxy that should be spinning, but it isn't. And nobody really knows why.... Almost every galaxy in the Universe is spinning, and once a galaxy gets its spin, it keeps it. Unless something dramatic and violent takes the spin away. Like a collision of two galaxies, when they merge together. All the stars and gas get scrambled up, and sloshed about stripping away some of that nice ordered rotation. And we think that over billions of years of repeated galaxy collisions, with each merger stripping away a little more of that rotation, you can get to what we call a slow rotator. A galaxy that has finally lost most of its spin. But a brand new paper using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, that was just published by Forrest et al., has discovered one of these slow rotator galaxies existing when the Universe was less than 2 billion years old. That goes against all our best models for how galaxies evolve over time; there shouldn’t have been enough time to strip

Tags: dr beccy, dr Beckie, astronomie, physiks