Scientists Reveal More Information on the Unstable "Monster Galaxy"

Christopher Davidson
September 1, 2018

There is a "monster galaxy" 12.4 billion light years away that an worldwide team of astronomers from Japan, Mexico and the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been analyzing for a while.

These most recent observational discoveries of COSMOS-AzTEC-1 were made possible by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a telescope and facility operated by an worldwide partnership in Chile.

Their observations have yielded "the most detailed anatomy chart of a monster galaxy", achieving an angular resolution 10 times higher than ever before, ALMA officials announced earlier today. The main image here is an artist's representation of the monster galaxy in question.

Using the ALMA 66 radio telescope dishes in the Chilean desert, an worldwide team of astronomers from the USA, Japan, Germany, and Mexico observed the AztEC-1 ancient "monster galaxy". Those high-density zones are the main areas for the galaxy's rapid star formation. "We now safe the first answers now".

Astronomer Min Yun at UMass Amherst was a member of the team that discovered this galaxy in 2007, using an instrument built at UMass called AzTEC. Starburst galaxies are ones where stars are forming at an unusually fast rate. So it's pretty to earn off-center clouds".

In addition to discovering more star-forming clouds than anticipated, Tadaki's team uncovered that these molecular clouds are "highly unstable", fueling star formation at un uncontrolled pace.

Normally, these two forces are balanced in the gas clouds until gravity eventually overpowers the pressure and it collapses, giving way to the rapid formation of stars.

Astronomers say they have captured the most detailed view of a "monster galaxy" generating stars at a pace 1,000 times faster than the Milky Way.

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Monster galaxy COSMOS-AzTEC-1 observed with the ALMA telescope in Chile.

"A accurate shock is that this galaxy viewed nearly thirteen billion years prior to now has a huge, ordered gas disk that is in traditional rotation as an alternate of what we had anticipated, which would safe been some roughly a disordered train destroy that most theoretical reviews had predicted", Min Yun, an astronomer at College of Massachusetts, Amherst, and co-writer on the novel work, said in an announcement.

Yun, an astronomy professor at UMass, said the gas disk is unstable, however, which means it is fragmenting and undergoing a very big episode of starburst.

Further, the team estimated that the gas in COSMOS-AzTEC-1 will be completely consumed in 100 million years.

Researchers have been wondering for a long time how early galaxies could form stars so quickly, the researchers said.

Researchers knew the galaxy was rich in star-forming gas when they first spotted it 10 years ago, but the details of the gassy giant revealed with ALMA weren't what they expected. But in this galaxy, gravity is winning: More and more gas is collapsing into stars, without being pushed outward strongly enough to slow down. Tadaki says, "At this moment, we have no evidence of merger in this galaxy. But by observing other similar galaxies with ALMA, we want to unveil the relation between galaxy mergers and monster galaxies", said Tadaki.

ALMA is a partnership of the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences of Japan (NINS), with the Republic of Chile.

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