Tuesday, March 24, 2026

Extragalactic Archaeology: A New Method To Understand Galaxy Growth and Evolution

NGC 1365 is also known as the Great Barred Spiral Example. It's a stunning example of its galaxy type. It's about 56 million light-years away in the Fornax Cluster. Researchers have used chemical fingerprints based on oxygen to map out its history. Image Credit: By Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURAImage processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), Jen Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab) - https://noirlab.edu/public/images/iotw2127a/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107557546

Galactic archaeology uses chemical fingerprints in the Milky Way to trace its formation and evolution. Now a team of researchers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian have employed it for the first time in a distant galaxy. This is the first example of extragalactic archaeology, and it relies on help from the powerful Illustris TNG simulations.



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