New simulation illuminates origin of the brightest galaxies

Moore Foundation grantees at Caltech and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are part of a group of researchers that developed a new simulation that may explain how submillimeter galaxies form. These kinds of galaxies are difficult to observe and make sense of because they are filled with dust that restricts the starlight from reaching the Earth. These galaxies are particularly interesting because of their massive size and the rate at which new stars are born within them. The simulation was carried out over a number of weeks on supercomputers and resulted in galaxies that looked like those that astronomers have observed. It was previously thought that these galaxies may have occurred as a merging of multiple galaxies, but instead, this simulation demonstrates that they are more likely to be “really big galaxies bombarded by smaller ones and eating the gas from their surroundings at all times,” as Dr. Dušan Kereš explains in the press release.  

Read the full press release here.