{"id":235479,"date":"2026-04-17T22:13:45","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T03:13:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/alma-and-jwst-investigate-giant-disk-galaxys-formation-and-evolution"},"modified":"2026-04-17T22:13:45","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T03:13:45","slug":"alma-and-jwst-investigate-giant-disk-galaxys-formation-and-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/alma-and-jwst-investigate-giant-disk-galaxys-formation-and-evolution","title":{"rendered":"ALMA and JWST investigate giant disk galaxy\u2019s formation and evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/alma-and-jwst-investigate-giant-disk-galaxys-formation-and-evolution2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>European astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a recently discovered giant disk galaxy known as ADF22.1. Results of the new observations, <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2604.07440\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> April 8 on the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server, shed more light on the formation and evolution of this galaxy.<\/p>\n<p>ADF22.1, also known as ADF22.A1, is a giant disk barred spiral galaxy residing in a proto-cluster known as SSA22 at a redshift of 3.09. It has an effective radius of some 22,800 light years and a stellar mass of about 100 billion solar masses. Previous observations have found that it is a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2025-07-radio-hint-galactic-nucleus-nearby.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">dusty star-forming galaxy<\/a> (DSFG) hosting an intrinsically bright yet heavily obscured active galactic nucleus (AGN).<\/p>\n<p>Giant disk galaxies with high stellar masses, like ADF22.1, are generally expected to be quiescent, bulge-dominated systems. Given that ADF22.1 is a starburst galaxy, it is perceived by astronomers as a unique laboratory to explore how early universe galaxies and supermassive black holes (SMBHs) accumulate their mass and ultimately evolve into the most massive elliptical galaxies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>European astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a recently discovered giant disk galaxy known as ADF22.1. Results of the new observations, published April 8 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the formation and evolution of this galaxy. ADF22.1, also known [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235479","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=235479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}