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Galaxies are thought to develop by the gravitational attraction between and merger of smaller 'sub-galaxies', a process that standard cosmological ideas suggest should be ongoing. But new data from a team of scientists from Liverpool John Moores University directly challenges this idea, suggesting that the growth of some of the most massive objects stopped 7 billion years ago when the Universe was half its present age.

How galaxies form and then evolve is still a major unanswered question in astronomy.

conventional simulations of the evolution of the Universe predict that BCGs should have at least tripled in size over that time.

: “We have discovered a distant galaxy that began forming stars just 200 million years after the Big Bang. This challenges theories of how soon galaxies formed and evolved in the first years of the Universe.

the first galaxies have been around for a lot longer than previously thought.”