A team of astronomers identified a distant galaxy with a pulse, meaning they may be able to determine how old it is and how close to death it is.
Published in the journal Nature, the new study detailed "pulses" of stars brightening and then fainting, which typically happens when they are dying. But witnessing these pulse can also help astronomers determine the age of the galaxy housing the stars.
"We tend to think of galaxies as steady beacons in the sky, but they are actually 'shimmering' due to all the giant, pulsating stars in them," study co-author Pieter van Dokkum, the Sol Goldman Professor and chair of astronomy at Yale University, said in a press release. "Cardiac arrest is not expected until a trillion years from now.
"That's a hundred times longer than the age of the universe."
With the Messier 87 elliptical galaxy, the astronomers used its stars' pulses to age the galaxy at 10 billion years, which backs up previous research.
"We have relatively few ways to determine how old galaxies are," study lead author Charlie Conroy, an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard University, told The Huffington Post. "This gives us a new tool to determine a galaxy's age, which is especially important for ancient galaxies like M87. The stars in this galaxy probably formed a very long time ago - maybe 10 billion years ago - and if that's true then this galaxy is a fossil relic from a much earlier time in the universe."
