An astronomer team witnessed, for the first time, of a violent cosmic collision in which a galaxy crosses another with an intense radiation in an authentic “galactic battle,” the Southern European Observatory (ESO) said Wednesday.
According to ESO, the study, published in the Nature magazine “reveals all the bloody details of this galactic battle”, observed through the extremely large telescope of ESO and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (soul).
In that battle, astronomers describe, two galaxies are engaged in an intense war, because again and again they load with each other at speeds of 500 kilometers per second in a violent collision course, only to kill a blow before retiring and prepare for another attack.
“That is why we call this system the ‘Cosmic Fair'”, comparing it to medieval combat, explained the study co-author, Pasquier Noterdaeme, researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Paris and the Chilean-French laboratory of Astronomy in Chile.
“But these galactic knights are not exactly gentlemany, and one of them has a very unfair advantage: use a quasar to pierce their opponent with a radiation spear,” which cushions the ability of the wounded galaxy to form new stars, said ESO.
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The quasars are the bright nuclei of some distant galaxies that are fed by supermassive black holes, releasing huge amounts of radiation.
The new observations indicate that the radiation released by the Cuasar breaks the clouds of gas and dust in the galaxy, leaving only the lesser dense regions.
It is likely that these regions will be too small to form stars, which drastically transforms this wounded galaxy, leaving it with very few stellar formation areas, said ESO, which adds that “this galactic victim” is not all that is being transformed.
The co -director of the study, Serguéi Balashev, a researcher at the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, explained that “it is believed that these mergers provide huge amounts of gas to the supermassive black holes residing in the centers of the galaxies.”
With EFE information
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