Science

Hubble discovers relic galaxy near home

March 13, 2018 14:04·
In this Hubble image we see NGC 1015 face-on with its beautifully symmetrical swirling arms and bright central bulge. Image credit NASA ESA Hubble A. Riess STScl & JHU

In this Hubble image we see NGC 1015 face-on with its beautifully symmetrical swirling arms and bright central bulge. Image credit NASA ESA Hubble A. Riess STScl & JHU

That galactic crash is expected to happen in about 4 billion years.

Formed some 12 billion years ago, the NGC 1277 galaxy birthed all of its stars within a span of 100 million years - a star formation rate 1,000 times greater than that of the Milky Way.

This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of galaxy NGC 1277.

The galaxies are flaming with gleaming areas of star formation.

And of course, even some of the largest structures in our universe, galaxies, will also die. some in a far more dramatic fashion than others. But at 240 million light-years away from Earth, NGC 1277 is close enough to offer insights. Ignacio Trujillo, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias at the University of La Laguna, Spain said that we can traverse such indigenous galaxies in depth and inspect the state of the premature universe.

The researchers learned that the relic galaxy has twice as many stars as our Milky Way, but physically it is as small as one quarter the size of our galaxy. Approximately NGC 1277 is in the form of arrested development.

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Described this week in the journal Nature, NGC 1277 is just one of 50 dense, compact relic galaxies identified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They were not surprised to find it, but simply consider that it was in the right place at the right time to evolve - or rather not evolve - the way it did.

Most galaxies feature both red globular clusters, full of metal-rich stars, and blue clusters, globs of metal-poor stars.

Red and dead galaxies host mostly red clusters.

However, NGC 1277 is nearly entirely lacking in blue globular clusters.

The red clusters are the strongest evidence that the galaxy went out of the star-making business long ago. But almost as quickly as the galaxy sprang to life, it died out. Their spiral shapes aren't almost as pronounced as they used to be, as the gravitational forces responsible for drawing the galaxies together cause them to become stretched and distorted.

"This image suspends them in a single moment, freezing the chaotic spray of gas, dust, and stars kicked up by the gravitational forces pulling the two galaxies together", the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a statement. As a result, the galaxy hosts a massive stellar popular but is extremely compact.

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