Back when it was just 3 billion years old, our universe experienced its most prolific period of star birth. Back then, galaxies formed stars here and there, thanks to the abundance of cold hydrogen gas. However, despite this abundance, some galaxies "died" at this period in time. And these weren't your ordinary galaxies. These were massive galaxies.
So what happened to their supply of cold gas? Kate Whitaker, the lead author of this cosmic study, asks this question and proposes some possible explanations.
The first possible explanation is that a supermassive black hole heated all the gas. Another was that these galaxies used up all their gas supply as they tried to make stars as quickly as possible.
The study of these dead galaxies was made possible through the combination of data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).
More about this over at NASA.
(Image Credit: NASA/ ALMA; Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))
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