61 research outputs found
The Complete Star Formation History of the Universe
The determination of the star-formation history of the Universe is a key goal
of modern cosmology, as it is crucial to our understanding of how structure in
the Universe forms and evolves. A picture has built up over recent years,
piece-by-piece, by observing young stars in distant galaxies at different times
in the past.
These studies indicated that the stellar birthrate peaked some 8 billion
years ago, and then declined by a factor of around ten to its present value.
Here we report on a new study which obtains the complete star formation history
by analysing the fossil record of the stellar populations of 96545 nearby
galaxies. Broadly, our results support those derived from high-redshift
galaxies elsewhere in the Universe. We find, however, that the peak of star
formation was more recent - around 5 billion years ago. Our study also shows
that the bigger the stellar mass of the galaxy, the earlier the stars were
formed. This striking result indicates a very different formation history for
high- and low-mass formation.Comment: Accepted by Nature. Press embargo until publishe
- âŠ