Astronomers Observe Distant Galaxy Emitting Star-Forming Material

The galaxy, A1689-zD1, was seen with gas flowing over its edges and is said to be the earliest known-run-of-the-mill galaxy.

By Edited by Gadgets 360 Newsdesk | Updated: 25 June 2022 06:32 IST

Astronomers Observe Distant Galaxy Emitting Star-Forming Material

Photo Credit: NASA

Astronomer Hollis Akins and his colleagues employed ALMA to study light

Highlights

A1689-zD1 cluster helped in intensifying the light by nearly 10 times
Galaxy has been spewing elements required for formation of star
It was spotted in light magnified by large galaxy cluster Abell 1989

Astronomers had a rare opportunity to observe a galaxy in the early universe that is providing its surroundings with the building blocks required to create later generations of stars and galaxies, thanks to a fortunate cosmic alignment. The experts have found that the distant galaxy has been spewing elements required for the formation of galaxies and stars. The galaxy, A1689-zD1, was seen with gas flowing over its edges and is said to be the earliest known-run-of-the-mill galaxy. It was spotted in light magnified by a large galaxy cluster named Abell 1989 that can intensify, bend, or gravitationally lens light from the earliest galaxies.

A1689-zD1 doesn't produce many stars, causing it to appear dimmer than other galaxies observed through telescopes. Here, the cluster helped in intensifying the light by nearly 10 times.

The astronomers have submitted their findings to arXiv.org.

Astronomer Hollis Akins and his colleagues employed the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a large network of radio telescopes, to study light. They observed the intensities of specific spectral lines of oxygen and carbon that indicate hot ionised gas and cold neutral gas, respectively.

“A1689-zD1 is located in the very early Universe— only 700 million years after the Big Bang. This is the era when galaxies were just beginning to form. What we see in these new observations is evidence of processes that may contribute to the evolution of what we call normal galaxies as opposed to massive galaxies. More importantly, these processes are ones we did not previously believe applied to these normal galaxies,” said Akins, an undergraduate student in astronomy at Grinnell College and the lead author of the research.

While the hot gas was traced near the bright stars, the astronomers were surprised to spot the cold gas extending four times farther.

“There has to be some mechanism to get carbon out into the circumgalactic medium,” said Akins. He suspected that the outflowing gas from the galaxy could be due to smaller galaxies merging with it or because of heat emitted from star formation which was pushing the gas out.

Tracing the gases, researchers noted that the hot gas had an overall larger movement than the cold one. This, according to Akin, meant that the hot gas was being pushed out from the galaxy's centre to the outer regions.

Akin explained that the hot gas flows out and expands before cooling down in the process. This causes the cold gas to appear flowing over A1689-zD1's edge. The findings showed that the phenomenon of gas outflow takes place not only in the extreme and super bright galaxies but in the normal ones too.

Should you pick Vivo over Galaxy S22 and OnePlus 10 Pro? We discuss this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.