Vanished: Where Did "Neutron" Galaxies of the Early Universe Go?

Ultradense cosmic cannonballs used to tear around the universe, punching through regular galaxies like a bullet through candyfloss, going their own way and heaven help the heaven that got in their way - and scientists don't know where they are now.  Luckily this is cosmology, not cinema, or the answer would be "Right behind you!"

Because of the speed of light staring into space is essentially looking back in time, and scientists have seen ultra-intense galaxies zipping around the first five billion years of existence.  Similar in principle to the intense density of neutron stars ( a collapsed star with a core so dense that a single spoonful would weigh 200 billion pounds) these galaxies were a thousand times denser than regular star-scatterings, packing as much mass as the Milky Way into 0.1% of the volume and far before regular galaxies had time to form.

Scientists suspect that these objects collapsed directly from vast clouds of proto-star material, unlike regular galaxies which form by multiple mergers of smaller galaxies.  But more important than where they came from is finding out where they went.  Three hundred billion stars isn't the kind of thing you lose down the back of the sofa.

It's unlikely they merged with other galaxies, since they'd punch through regular star collections like an armor-piercing round with only minimal effects on themselves, and collision with another ultra-dense galaxy would only create an even bigger stupidly intense star selection.  Other processes which could hide them, such as building up a diffuse gas cloud or expanding due to stellar detonations, would seem to take longer than the universe has actually had so far.  Despite being awesome.

Space.  Every time we look there's something cooler.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Cosmic Cannonballs http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17281-cosmic-cannonballs-found-in-early-universe.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=cosmology

Comments

[blu]

Perhaps instead of expanding, these ultra dense galaxies continued collapsing, eventually into super-massive black holes. Those may be kind of hard to find, right?

Just my first random thought, so don't rip me too hard when you easily disprove my VERY preliminary theory. :)

[ShadowDS]

No ripping here blu, I would agree as I had similar thoughts myself.

My theory:
Since these galaxies where ultra dense, they likely had fast burning stars much more than what we see in our own. These starts could live for a fraction of our sun (as low as a million years) and would definely collapse into black holes.

Over time material will lessen and the material that did not eventually form black holes would form dimmer longer life stars which would live much longer but would be too dim to see.

On top of that they would outnumbered in a galaxy filled with black holes which if they [the black holes] didn't merge themselves, would definately alter or absorb the light coming from those dim stars.

And even if such formations were visible, we may be mis-labeling them as "globular clusters" since the light coming from them would be significantly reduced.

Such a find would explain why some globular clusters appear to have far more mass than can be visually accounted for;

Would also explain some rapid movements of stars in other globular clusters;

Even Gamma-ray bursts that come seemingly from no where, which chould be black holes in these dense micro galaxies merging!

But thats just a theory...

[DD]

blu and ShadowDS,

I also agree and propose we take it one step further. Could not these Neutron Galaxies after collapse into a super massive black hole become the seeds for the first generation of "normal" galaxies since it is postulated that every galaxy has a super massive black hole at its center.

Again just a theory

[ShadowDS]

DD,
It is possible and i would say likely given the number of galaxies there are in the visible universe [millions of billions] that at least one of them formed in this manner.

[Barrie O'Leary]

What fabulous comments. I can only imagine that here lies the answer to dark matter and dark energy.

[Globalsewingmachine]

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