Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2004-07-07
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Nature, in press as a Letter, 8th July issue. 12 pages, 1 Table, 4 Figures
Scientific paper
10.1038/nature02668
More than half of all stars in the local Universe are found in massive spheroidal galaxies, which are characterized by old stellar populations with little or no current star formation. In present models, such galaxies appear rather late as the culmination of a hierarchical merging process, in which larger galaxies are assembled through mergers of smaller precursor galaxies. But observations have not yet established how, or even when, the massive spheroidals formed, nor if their seemingly sudden appearance when the Universe was about half its present age (at redshift z \approx 1) results from a real evolutionary effect (such as a peak of mergers) or from the observational difficulty of identifying them at earlier epochs. Here we report the spectroscopic and morphological identification of four old, fully assembled, massive (>10^{11} solar masses) spheroidal galaxies at 1.6
Cassata Paolo
Cimatti Andrea
Cristiani Stefano
Daddi Emanuele
Fontana Adriano
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