Massive galaxies found in the early universe needed a lot—a store of cold molecular gases totaling as much as 100 billion times the mass of our sun.
But where did these early, super-sized galaxies get that much cold gas when they were hemmed in by hotter surroundings?
In a new study, astronomers led by the University of Iowa report direct, observational evidence of streams of cold gas they believe provisioned these early, massive galaxies. They detected cold gas pipelines that knifed through the hot atmosphere in the dark matter halo of an early massive galaxy, supplying the materials for the galaxy to form stars.
