The galaxy XMM-VID1-2075 is so far away from us that we see it as it was when the universe was 2 billion years old. The most surprising thing about it is that it isn’t spinning, but scientists already know the reason why.
Rotation of galaxies
A galaxy that barely rotates has been discovered in the early universe. This was reported by a group of American scientists who published an article in the journal Nature Astronomy on May 4. The study is based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope.
In fact, astronomers have observed galaxies with virtually no rotation on several occasions. However, these were all very old and massive systems located very close to us. Overall, rotation is such a fundamental property of galaxies that every instance where it is barely detectable presents a small mystery to astronomers.
Rotation arises as a result of the sum of the angular momenta of the masses of matter during the very early stages of evolution. And even if the total mass of the star system is not moving in a single direction, individual objects within it follow highly complex orbits.
XMM-VID1-2075 Galaxy
The last thing scientists expected to see was a galaxy that wasn’t rotating in the early universe. After all, the conditions for such motion already exist there, and there is no reason for it to stop. According to the generally accepted theory, this occurs as a result of repeated mergers.
However, the fact remains: the galaxy XMM-VID1-2075 shows virtually no rotation, even though it is only about 2 billion years old. And it has already lost almost all of its rotation. In fact, astronomers have already determined that it is one of the most massive galaxies observed in the early universe. This clue helped solve the mystery.
The scientists looked for other galaxies from that era that also had very slow rotation or chaotic stellar motion. They discovered two more of these, and both are very large by the standards of the era in which we observe them. Scientists have concluded that they are all the result of a single, very rare phenomenon: the merger of two galaxies that had previously been rotating in opposite directions at nearly identical speeds. This hypothesis may indeed explain why this galaxy is so strange.
According to phys.org
