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When NASA sets its sights on a far-away galaxy, there's often a lot to take in. Even if it only appears to be a blob, researchers can often combine various observations to determine the galaxy's size and shape. Normally, they're just there, sitting in space, creating new stars and doing the other things that galaxies do. J224607.55-052634.9 is a special feature of a recent snapshot of a galaxy.
Originally discovered a few years ago, new observations of the galaxy by Chile's ALMA array show that the galaxy is actually eating its neighbors. From our vantage point, the galaxy is tearing apart a total of three smaller galaxies, yanking material off its gravitational pull.
NASA says that WISE J224607.55-052634.9 is considered the "most luminous" galaxy, and this new observation helps to explain why.
The extremely bright galaxy is not a record breaker in terms of size, so why is it so bright? Scientists now believe that galaxy is essentially stealing "fuel" to power its energy output from three neighboring galaxies. As the intense gravity sucks up the material of the trio of smaller galaxies, the larger central body continues to give birth to new stars and cause super-heated gas and debris to glow brightly around the black hole at its heart.
Researchers had a hunch that the incredibly bright galaxy had some neighbors, but had no idea that it was actually feeding on them. Their work was published in the newspaper Science.
"We know that these galaxies were three companions, but there was no evidence of interactions between these neighbors and the central source," Tanio Diaz-Santos, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "We were not looking for cannibalistic behavior and were not expecting it, but this deep dive with the ALMA observatory makes it very clear."
WISE J224607.55-052634.9 might be hungry, but you do not need to worry about our own Milky Way falling victim to its gluttonous ways. The galaxy is worth a whopping 12.4 billion light years from Earth.
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