Red and Dead: Gas Guzzling Carbon Monoxide Galaxy Fated for Destruction

In this case, a certain galaxy is both red and dead. Astronomers have discovered the carbon monoxide in a galaxy located about 12 billion light-years from Earth and have found that it's running out of gas, slowly pushing it toward its own destruction.

The galaxy, called ALESS65, was first spotted by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and is one of fewer than 20 known distant galaxies to contain carbon monoxide. In fact, at first astronomers thought that there couldn't be "red and dead" galaxies in the distant universe. That's why studying galaxies headed toward that fate is crucial to understanding how they exist in the first place.

"We're familiar with carbon monoxide here on Earth as the deadly gas that can cause suffocation, but in galaxies it plays an important role in the lifecycle of stars," said Minh Huynh, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Out of the galaxies that we know contain carbon monoxide, less than 20 are as far away from Earth as ALESS65. Out of the billions of galaxies out there, the detections are very rare!"

All galaxies have a certain amount of fuel to make new stars. For example, the Milky Way has about five billion years before it runs out of fuel and becomes "red and dead." In contrast, ALESS65 has only 10s of millions of years left, which is extremely fast in astronomical terms.

"We were able to work out the strength of the UV radiation in ALESS65; it's similar to some 'starbursting' galaxies in the local universe, but the stars in ALESS65 are forming in much larger areas when compared to local galaxies," said Huynh. "Finding and studying carbon monoxide in more galaxies will tell us even more about how stars formed in the early days of the universe and help solve the mystery of far away 'red and dead' galaxies."

The findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.