[ad_1]
Everything has an expiration date, from the milk in your fridge to the Milky Way.
Galaxies begin to die, according to CBS News, when all the stars they contain die off and no new replacements are generated. In these cases, all the gas in a galaxy is ejected, making it impossible for new stars to form. Once this happens, the galaxy itself “ceases to exist”.
CNN reports that, with the help of Chile’s large Atacama Millimeter / submillimeter telescope array, scientists have managed to spot a distant galaxy entering its final stages of life by ejecting nearly half of the gas it uses to form stars. Researchers at Durham University published their findings in an article published on Phys.org.
New research carried out by the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, the French Commission for Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy (CEA) -Saclay and the University of Paris-Saclay, shows that a huge amount of gas forming stars was ejected into the intergalactic medium by the coming together of two galaxies.
The galaxy in question is known to astronomers as ID2299, a galaxy so far from Earth that its light takes around 9 billion years to travel here.
This means that when astronomers look at ID2299 through their sophisticated telescopes, they are essentially looking at the galaxy’s past and studying its behavior when the universe was only 4.5 billion years old. (According to CNN, the universe is around 14 billion years old.)
Annagrazia Puglisi, a postdoctoral research associate at Durham University in the UK recently commented on the sightings in a statement, via CNN. She said:
“This is the first time that we have observed a typical massive star-forming galaxy in the distant Universe on the verge of ‘dying’ due to a massive ejection of cold gas.”
CBS News reports that the ID2299 is losing 10,000 suns a year and is quickly depleting the fuel it needs to generate new ones. According to CNN, ID2299 simultaneously forms stars at a rate several hundred times faster than that of our Milky Way galaxy, effectively draining the rest of its precious gas. This specific behavior is what leads astronomers to believe that in a few tens of thousands of years the galaxy will no longer exist.
The current theory is that ID2299 started exhibiting this behavior after it collided with another galaxy, reports CNN. Confirmation of their theory could force astronomers to reconsider previous theories about galactic life cycles, according to one of the study’s co-authors, Dr Jeremy Fensch. He said (via CBS News):
“The study of this unique case revealed the possibility that this type of event is not at all unusual and that many galaxies are suffering from this ‘gravitational gas extraction’, including some misinterpreted past observations. … This could have huge consequences for our understanding of what really shapes the evolution of galaxies.
[ad_2]
Source link