CullmanTimes.com - Cullman, Alabama

Top News

Related Photos

  • This undated handout artist illustration provided by NASA shows a cosmic supermom. It's a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA's X-Ray telescope to spot this distant galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year. This new galaxy is about 5.7 billion light years away. It is in the center of a recently discovered cluster of galaxies that give the brightest x-ray glow astronomers have seen. The study appears Wednesday in the journal Nature. (AP Photo/NASA)

    Supermom Galaxy_Shav.jpg

Discussion

August 16, 2012

Star births seen on cosmic scale in distant galaxy

By SETH BORENSTEIN Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It’s a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year.

Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year.

The galaxy is about 5.7 billion light years away in the center of a recently discovered cluster of galaxies that give off the brightest X-ray glow astronomers have seen. It is by far the biggest creation of stars that astronomers have seen for this kind of galaxy. Other types, such as colliding galaxies, can produce even more stars, astronomers said.

But this is the size, type and age of galaxy that shouldn’t be producing stars at such a rapid pace, said the authors of a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“It’s very extreme,” said Harvard University astronomer Ryan Foley, co-author of the study. “It pushes the boundaries of what we understand.”

The unnamed galaxy — officially known by a string of letters and numbers — is about 3 trillion times the size of our sun, said study lead author Michael McDonald of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The galaxy that is producing the stars at a rate of two per day is the biggest and most prominent of many galaxies there.

It’s “helping us answer this basic question of how do galaxies form their stars,” said Michigan State University astronomer Megan Donahue, who wasn’t part of the study but praised it.

There’s lots of very hot hydrogen gas between galaxies. When that gas cools to below zero, the gas can form stars, McDonald said. But only 10 percent of the gas in the universe becomes stars, Donahue said.

That’s because the energy from black holes in the center of galaxies counteract the cooling. There’s a constant “tussle between black holes and star formation,” said Sir Martin Rees, a prominent astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge in England. He was not part of the study, but commented on it during a NASA teleconference Wednesday.

In this case, the black hole in the central galaxy seems to be unusually quiet compared to other supermassive black holes, Rees said. “So it’s losing the tussle,” he said.

But this massive burst of star birth is probably only temporary because there’s only so much fuel and limits to how big a galaxy can get, Foley said.

“It could be just a very short-lived phase that every galaxy cluster has and we just got lucky here” to see it, Foley said.







 

Text Only
Top News
Facebook
AP Video
James Gandolfini Dies at Age 51 Fmr. TWA Flight 800 Investigators Want New Probe Raw: Heat, Spurs Back on Court Ahead of Game 7 Dolce and Gabbana Convicted of Tax Evasion Paris, Prince Depositions Used in Jackson Trial Coiffed Cattle Get Their Close-up In Berlin, Obama Channels Cold War Activism Police at Patriots Tight End's Home for 2nd Day Fed Suggests Bond Purchases Could Slow AP: DOJ Broke Own Rules Seizing Phone Records Raw: Baby White Rhino Debuts at Australian Zoo Time Lapse: Rebuilding Bridge Post-collapse Ohio Woman Accuses 3 of Holding Her Captive Hunt for Ex-Teamster Boss Hoffa's Remains Ends
Community Calendar
Loading…
Events by eviesays.com