Galactic Collisions: The Birth of New Worlds and Stars

2024-02-11 00:00:00

Written by Samah Labib Sunday, February 11, 2024 02:00 AM

When two galaxies collide, the results can be devastating, as one of the galaxies ends up being torn apart, but at the same time it creates new worlds as well. As the swirling masses of gas and dust are pulled by the gravitational forces of the interacting galaxies, there can be explosions of star formation, leading to To create new generations of stars.

And he picked up Hubble Space Telescope Recently one of the hotspots of star formation in the galaxy AM 1054-325 was distorted by a collision with another nearby galaxy.

According to the digitartlends website, this collision created a long path for this galaxy called the “tidal tail,” which is thousands of light years long, where millions of new stars are born. The researchers studied 12 interacting galaxies to discover a total of 435 groups of new stars, with each group hosting something Up to a million small stars.

“It’s a surprise to see so much little stuff in the tails,” lead author Michael Rudrak of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia said in a statement. “It tells us a lot regarding the efficiency of mass formation. Using tidal tails, you will build new generations of stars that would not otherwise exist.” “

The study combined new observations from Hubble with old archival data to determine the ages and masses of star clusters in these tidal tails. The biggest surprise was that these clusters were very young, only 10 million years old.

However, it is uncertain whether these clusters will survive for a long time, and might clump together into a group and form globular star clusters, or they can stay with the gravity of the original galaxy and form a halo around it. Individual stars may break away from the structure completely and become lone stars. Intergalactic.

1707610618
#Hubble #Telescope #monitors #formation #young #stars #collision #galaxies