The Earliest Galaxies Rotated Slowly, Revving up Over Billions of Years - by PaulMattSutter
MACS1149-JD1 existed when the universe was only 500 million years old, making it among the youngest known galaxies. The team used ALMA to study O III, or doubly-ionized oxygen, in the disk of the galaxy. They then developed a model of the size and rotation speed of the disk of the galaxy to compare against observations. They reported their results in a paperThe team found that MACS1149-JD1 is only 3,000 light-years across.
“The rotation speed of JD1 is much slower than those found in galaxies in later epochs and our [Milky Way] Galaxy and it is likely that JD1 is at an initial stage of developing a rotational motion,” says Akio K. Inoue, a co-author of the paper, also at Waseda University. These results suggest that galaxies start out small and rotate slowly. Then, over the course of billions of years, they
and increase their rotation rate. The team hopes to use the James Webb Space Telescope to conduct further studies of galaxy rotation rates over cosmic time.
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