How giant galaxies could form just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang

The existence of massive, elliptical galaxies in the early universe has puzzled astronomers for two decades. An international team led by Nikolaus Sulzenauer and Axel Weiß from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) used data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to shed light on this open question of galaxy formation. They studied one of the most spectacular galaxy aggregations in great detail and published their results in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal.