Surprisingly Recent Galaxy Discovered Using Machine Learning – May Be the Last Generation Galaxy in the Long Cosmic History - SciTechDaily

HSC J1631+4426 broke the record for the lowest oxygen abundance.

New results achieved by combining big data captured by the Subaru Telescope and the power of machine learning have discovered a galaxy with an extremely low oxygen abundance of 1.6% solar abundance, breaking the previous record of the lowest oxygen abundance.

The measured oxygen abundance suggests that most of the stars in this galaxy formed very recently.

To understand galaxy evolution, astronomers need to study galaxies in various stages of formation and evolution.

Most of the galaxies in the modern Universe are mature galaxies, but standard cosmology predicts that there may still be a few galaxies in the early formation stage in the modern Universe.

However, it was difficult to find galaxies in the early stage of galaxy formation from the data because the wide-field data includes as many as 40 million objects.

They had a computer repeatedly learn the galaxy colors expected from theoretical models, and then let the computer select only galaxies in the early stage of galaxy formation.

They have found that one galaxy (HSC J1631+4426), located 430 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules, has an oxygen abundance only 1.6 percent of that of the Sun.

The measured oxygen abundance suggests that most of the stars in this galaxy formed very recently.

In other words, this galaxy is undergoing an early stage of the galaxy evolution.

This small mass also supports the primordial nature of the HSC J1631+4426 galaxy.

First, this is the evidence about a galaxy at such an early stage of galaxy evolution existing today.

The discovery of the HSC J1631+4426 galaxy backs up the picture of the standard cosmology.

The HSC J1631+4426 galaxy may be the last generation galaxy in the long cosmic history.