Overview
- The Center for Astrophysics team, in a Nature Astronomy paper published Monday, reports the first fine-detail chemical reconstruction of a galaxy beyond the Milky Way.
- Using the TYPHOON survey on the Irénée du Pont telescope, researchers mapped oxygen across thousands of star‑forming regions in the face‑on spiral NGC 1365.
- They compared those maps to roughly 20,000 Illustris simulations and identified one close match that provided a physics-based timeline of mergers and gas flows.
- The results show an early, oxygen‑rich central region, with the outer disk and spiral arms building later through repeated mergers with dwarf galaxies over 12 billion years.
- The study establishes extragalactic archaeology as a tool to test how typical the Milky Way’s path is, with plans to apply the method to more nearby, well‑resolved galaxies.