Lulu Miller

dimming ones and she'd perform autopsies trying to figure out whether it had been something from the outside or the inside which caused it to lose its light day after day galaxy after galaxy and then one day

1,639 days after the worst day, she saw something odd.

She was looking at this one group of eight dimming galaxies.

Quiescent, which means they were not making new stars.

So they're that kind of like holding pattern red, slowly dying, but still emitting light vibe.

And so was that at first puzzling?

Because you're like the whole thing about why they die is like it's pushed out or it's heated up or it's ejected or it's and you're like, but the food is right there.

It's there.

So she started measuring everything she could think of, sort of taking the vitals of those galaxies with cold gas reservoirs.

She looked at their metal composition, their growth charts, how they had grown in stars and mass over time.

Wait, so meaning like these dying, dimming galaxies, the ones that had the gas were making new stars from a place of death?

Yeah.

What?

Like you saw the...

The physical matter of what it takes to come back to life for a galaxy.

Yeah, exactly.

Then does it still sputter out?

Or could it ever get back into real star formation?

Could it ever keep going and get alive again?

Yeah, definitely.