Everyone knows these days that galaxies are regular incubators for stars. But what about outside the galactic city limits, so to speak? Turns out this isn't necessarily such a dead zone after all.
Researchers have been observing a galaxy 200 million light years away that has a giant, trailing tail, much like a comet. Apparently created when gas was stripped away from the galaxy as it moved the gaseous region of a larger galaxy cluster, the tail extends more than 200,000 light years away from its parent – and has surprisingly turned out to be a fertile source of stars itself.
Scientists had previously been unsure whether such formations had the density of material needed to create stars. But the tail in galaxy ESO 137-001 contains spots of ionized hydrogen, glowing in visible light spectrum, which researchers believe to be the signature of young stars, formed within the last 10 millions years or so.
It's not the first time researchers have seen a tail of this kind –
indeed, many believe the comet-like patterns were much more common in the early universe. But the evidence of star creation here is striking, and gives researchers new data in understanding the phenomenon of “orphan stars,” or stars created outside the confines of a regular galaxy.
The results were compiled using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope in Chile.
Orphan Stars Found in Long Galaxy Tail [Chandra X-Ray Observatory]
(Photo: Composite X-ray and optical light image of ESO 137-001. Credit:
NASA/CXC/MSU/M.Sun et al; H-alpha/Optical: SOAR
(MSU/NOAO/UNC/CNPq-Brazil)/M.Sun et al.)
