Scientists find dead galaxy older than any ever found

It appears to have burnt out when the cosmos was just 5 per cent of its current age.

Star formation had already stopped in the galaxy some 13.1 billion years ago, just 700 million years after the universe began. While scientists have found similar “dead” galaxies before, it is the oldest by 500 million years.

Scientists say the galaxy lived fast and died young, the Cambridge researchers who found it said. Such behaviour was not expected until the new galaxy was discovered.

“The galaxy seemed to have lived fast and intensely, and then stopped forming stars very rapidly,” said astrophysicist Tobias Looser of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

“In the first few hundred million years of its history, the universe was violent and active, with plenty of gas around to fuel star formation in galaxies. That makes this discovery particularly puzzling and interesting,” Looser added.

This galaxy is relatively small, with perhaps 100 million to one billion stars. That would put it in the neighborhood of the mass of the Small Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxy situated near our Milky Way, though that one is still forming new stars.

After a galaxy stops forming new stars, it becomes a bit like a stellar graveyard.

“Once star formation ends, existing stars die and are not replaced. This happens in a hierarchical fashion, by order of stellar weight, because the most massive stars are the hottest and shine the brightest, and as a result have the shortest lives,” Kavli Institute astrophysicist and study co-