In what may be a significant advance in our knowledge of the universe, scientists have seen a remote galaxy beginning to die.
If they avoid having a star formation, galaxies continue to "die." Many such dead galaxies spread across the cosmos have been discovered by scientists. Still, they have not been able to precisely tell why.
Astronomers already have a sound vision of such a remarkable occurrence. They expect that it can shed light on the mechanism contributing to the demise of galaxies.
Annagrazia Puglisi, lead researcher and postdoctoral research associate at Durham University in the United Kingdom and the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre in France, said in a statement experts witnessed a standard large star formation galaxy in the distant galaxy about to die for the first time because of a massive cold gas ejection.
Experts published their study on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Losing Around 10,000 Suns Worth of Hydrogen
Every year, the observed galaxy loses about 10,000 Suns worth of hydrogen, implying it runs out of fuel to produce new stars. Almost half of the hydrogen has already been destroyed. While it's already making stars at a pace hundreds of times higher than our own Milky Way, it's going to use up the remains in only a few tens of millions of years because it's going to die out like it does.
Since the galaxy is 9 billion light-years distant, observers are looking at incidents in the relative youth of the universe, when the world was just 4.5 billion years old.
Astronomers suggest a galaxy merger with another galaxy triggered the sudden demise, possibly altering our view of how incidents might happen.
Possible Collission
The galaxy merged to establish the one discovered by astronomers and called ID2299 when the two galaxies collided. In the shape of a "tidal tail", a long stream of stars and gas stretching into interstellar space shows where the impact was detected.
Typically, those signs are too dim to be detected in distant galaxies. Yet, by mistake, the researchers captured it only before it was being shot out and were thereby able to recognise it.
The deaths of galaxies arise as their star-forming content is tossed out into space, leaving it lacking the requisite material to create new stars. So far, several scientists have assumed that the currents that explode as stars develop and the black holes that exist at the core of the galaxies are the products of this.
The new study reveals, however, that such collisions can destroy them, too.
The new paper also indicates that these two incidents may be quickly mixed up: they can appear identical to those deaths caused by winds when gas ejections are induced by galaxy mergers and left behind tidal tails. As such, the researchers said that prior studies that seemed to point to winds may have probably detected tidal tails all along, and previous study would need to be re-evaluated.
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