The largest galaxies in the universe got to their size by cannibalizing other beetleweed over many billions of years , but in the early universe of discourse , the big beetleweed have long been thought to have formed by devouring intergalactic gas .

The evidence for the dissimilar behavior has been limited but now an outside squad of astronomers has discovered an ancient protocluster feeding from a giant , dense swarm of cold gas . The new object , cry the Spiderweb Galaxy , is located 10 billion light - years away and is in reality made of several protogalaxies surrounded by 100 billion solar peck ' worth of gas .

The research by an external team of astronomers was published inScienceand combined the notice of the Australia Telescope Compact Array ( ATCA ) , which study the extent of the gas pedal , and the National Science Foundation ’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array ( VLA ) , which discovered that two - third of the gas is between the protogalaxies .

" This is a vast system , with this molecular gas spanning three time the size of our own whitish Way Galaxy , " said co - writer Preshanth Jagannathan of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory ( NRAO ) , in astatement . " It appears that this whole system finally will collapse into a single , mammoth galaxy . "

The radio telescopes looked at carbon copy monoxide present in the cloud and discovered that it had an exceedingly dusty temperature of about -200 ° C ( -328 ° F ) . These two fact are crucial for our understanding of galaxy organic evolution .

Carbon and oxygen were n’t make in the Big Bang , so they must have been produced by stars in these type of beetleweed and then ejected from them . But the exclusion mechanics usually warm up up the accelerator to a very high temperature , while this gas is really stale .

The gasolene falls onto the key protogalaxy , which increases in size and will finally fuse with the other protogalaxies .

" This is unlike from what we see in the nearby Universe , where coltsfoot in clusters mature by cannibalizing other galaxy . In this clustering , a giant galax is growing by feeding on the soup of insensate gun in which it is submerged , " pronounce Bjorn Emonts of the Center for Astrobiology in Spain , who moderate the squad .

This discovery of protogalaxy conduct affirm what simulations have indicated already , that there ’s a lot more going on in the other universe than we sympathize .

This inquiry render a unexampled tantalizing new feel at the life of galaxies when they began to form .