New pictures from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have helped astronomers learn more about quenched galaxies.
When galaxies stop forming new stars, they become quenched. Despite this fact, there are galaxies out there that continue to grow without forming new stars.
"We found that a large number of the bigger galaxies instead switch off at later times, joining their smaller quenched siblings and giving the mistaken impression of individual galaxy growth over time," co-author Simon Lilly, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said in a press statement according to Discovery.com.
Researchers used observations from Hubble's Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), THE Canada-France Hawaii Telescope and the Subaru Telescope to map out an area of the sky around nine times the size of the moon.
"No single collection of images has been large enough to enable us to study very large numbers of galaxies in exactly the same way until Hubble's COSMOS," said co-author Nick Scoville in a press statement.
Then astronomers made a video of the quenched galaxies seen by Hubble.
Click here to see the quenched galaxies.
The images say a lot about how galaxies have evolved over the last eight or nine billion years.
According to their research, it seems star production just switched off earlier in older galaxies compared to newer ones. Star-making galaxies were smaller in the early universe according to Discovery.com.
"The apparent puffing up of quenched galaxies has been one of the biggest puzzles about galaxy evolution for many years," said lead author Marcella Carollo in a press statement. "Our study offers a surprisingly simple and obvious explanation to this puzzle. Whenever we see simplicity in nature amidst apparent complexity, it's very satisfying."
The Hubble Space Telescope has made over 1 million science observations since being introduced in 1990. NASA revealed this year that it will extend the telescope's operations through April 2016 according to a press release.
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