Overview
- The Center for Astrophysics team, whose peer-reviewed study appeared in Nature Astronomy on Monday, reports the first detailed chemical archaeology of a galaxy beyond the Milky Way.
- Their reconstruction finds an early, oxygen-rich core, an outer disk built through many dwarf-galaxy mergers, and spiral arms that formed within the last few billion years.
- Using the TYPHOON survey on the Irénée du Pont telescope, they mapped oxygen across 4,546 regions at about 175 parsecs in the face-on spiral NGC 1365.
- Oxygen works as a clear tracer because massive stars make it quickly and seed nearby gas, so its pattern marks where star formation rose and fell across the galaxy.
- The team searched roughly 20,000 IllustrisTNG galaxies to find a close match that supports current formation models, and they aim to apply the method to nearby targets such as Andromeda where the needed detail is possible.