A new study has come to the startling conclusion that as many as half of all stars in the universe may be rogue, having been ejected from their birthplaces
by galaxy collisions or mergers.
Not exact matches
Yet the
collisions or near misses dictated
by these theories are inherently very improbable, perhaps only ten for the entire life of our
galaxy during the past five billion years.32 With so few planets in existence, we could hardly assume that there would be much life elsewhere, at least not in our
galaxy.
It combines visible light images from Hubble and the Very Large telescope (shown in blue, green, and red)- which show gas and stars - with X-ray images from Chandra (shown in pink) which picks out extremely hot gas in between the
galaxies, heated
by the
collision.
Astronomers speculate that the
galaxy might have been distorted
by a
collision with another
galaxy.
«
Galaxies are shaped
by collisions and mergers, as well as this sweeping of their gas from cosmic winds.
Because these events unfold on billion - year timescales, each pair of
galaxies observed
by Hubble provides just a snapshot at a particular stage of the
collision and merger process.
And since the color and brightness of young clusters gives their ages — and therefore, the time since a
collision began — astronomers hope to put together a series of snapshots of the entire
collision process
by looking at many examples of merging
galaxies.
The objects causing these low - frequency ripples — such as orbiting supermassive black holes at the centers of distant
galaxies — would be different from the higher frequency ripples, emitted
by collisions of much smaller black holes, that have so far been detected on Earth.
The neutron stars» union also gave researchers the opportunity to gauge the universe's expansion rate,
by measuring the distance of the
collision using gravitational waves and comparing that to how much the wavelength of light from the
galaxy was stretched
by the expansion.
This spot is believed to be the nucleus of the former spiral
galaxy, which was ejected from the system during the
collision and is now being shredded
by tidal forces to produce the visible stellar stream.
By studying the distribution of the x-ray emitting gas and the individual
galaxies in the cluster, the team also concluded that El Gordo is actually two clusters in
collision.
El Gordo consists of two clusters in
collision, as revealed
by the two separate swarms of individual
galaxies (red) and the asymmetric cloud of hot, x-ray emitting gas (blue) in between.
The star got too close to its
galaxy's central black hole about 290 million years ago, and
collisions among its torn - apart pieces caused an eruption of optical, ultraviolet and X-ray light that was first spotted
by scientists in 2014.
Perhaps just as incredible, the clouds of hot interstellar gas formerly contained
by the
galaxies — and superheated
by the
collision so they glow in x-ray light — seem to have been grabbed
by the dark matter instead of being flung into space.
That is probably because typical spirals such as Andromeda are transformed
by collisions with other
galaxies over their lifetimes.
The Cartwheel
galaxy's concentric rings of star formation were probably triggered
by a
collision with a smaller
galaxy, possibly one of the ones in the bottom - left of this multi-wavelength image.
Dazzling eyelid - like features bursting with stars in
galaxy IC 2163 formed from a tsunami of stars and gas triggered
by a glancing
collision with
galaxy NGC 2207 (a portion of its spiral arm is shown on right side of image).
In this case, the large
galaxy may have originally been a spiral, not unlike our own Milky Way
Galaxy, transformed
by the
collision.
In the local Universe (which stretches out 380 million light years), such dusty starbursts appear to be formed
by the
collision of two
galaxies, which powers the subsequent star genesis.
The
collision that produced it released more power in an instant than is radiated
by all the stars and
galaxies in the universe at any moment.
Another tantalizing possibility is that the low - frequency images may reveal «halos» and «relics» produced
by collisions of
galaxies in clusters.
A cigar - shaped «prolate»
galaxy is formed
by the
collision of two large
galaxies at a specific angle.
This scientific visualization presents a
galaxy collision supercomputer simulation and compares the different stages of the
collision to different interacting
galaxy pairs observed
by Hubble.
Future high - resolution infrared observations from the James Webb Space Telescope will complement these discoveries
by providing greater detail of the dynamics of cool stars, gas and dust during
galaxy collisions.