{"id":220398,"date":"2025-08-19T04:31:36","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T09:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/excavating-eridu-observations-explore-nature-of-massive-ancient-galaxy"},"modified":"2025-08-19T04:31:36","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T09:31:36","slug":"excavating-eridu-observations-explore-nature-of-massive-ancient-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/excavating-eridu-observations-explore-nature-of-massive-ancient-galaxy","title":{"rendered":"Excavating Eridu: Observations explore nature of massive ancient galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/excavating-eridu-observations-explore-nature-of-massive-ancient-galaxy2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>By analyzing the data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere have probed the properties of a massive and old galaxy designated SMILES-GS-191748. Results of the study, <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2508.05752\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> August 7 on the pre-print server <i>arXiv<\/i>, shed more light on the nature of this galaxy.<\/p>\n<p>SMILES-GS-191748 is a massive and quiescent galaxy at a redshift of 2.675. The galaxy most likely contains a very old stellar population that first formed when the universe was young.<\/p>\n<p>Given that very little is known about the properties of SMILES-GS-191748, a team of astronomers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison\u2019s Ian McConachie decided to inspect this galaxy using JWST and HST. They nicknamed SMILES-GS-191748 \u201cEridu,\u201d after the ancient Bronze Age Sumerian city in Mesopotamia due to the galaxy\u2019s suspected early formation time and apparent quiescent nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By analyzing the data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere have probed the properties of a massive and old galaxy designated SMILES-GS-191748. Results of the study, published August 7 on the pre-print server arXiv, shed more light on the nature [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}