We Just Discovered a New Type of Colossal Galaxy

[Reefa]

Super Spirals

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology have discovered a massive new kind of galaxy, which they now call a “super spiral.” These galaxies give off bright light that can shine up to 14 times that of the Milky Way Galaxy.

 

Simply put, super spirals are enormous.

 

They have diameters that can measure up to 437,000 light-years. For comparison, the Milky Way is just a little over 100,000 light-years across. And they can weigh up to 340 billion solar masses. The massive size also means that super spirals can give off an incredible amount of ultraviolet and mid-infrared light. To that end, the galaxy has a very high rate of star formation, generating new stars 30 times faster than our galaxy.

 

The discovery was made by a team of astronomers led by Dr. Patrick Ogle, who write that they had chanced upon the galaxies in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) while in search of other extremely luminous and massive galaxies.

 

Co-author Dr. George Helou said: “Remarkably, the finding of super spiral galaxies came out of purely analyzing the contents of the NED database, thus reaping the benefits of the careful, systematic merging of data from many sources on the same galaxies.”

Data and Discovery

images of super spiral galaxies. Examples with peculiar morphology: (1) multi-arm spiral, (8) asymmetric two-arm spiral, (21) ring galaxy, (23) possible tidal arm, (33) asymmetric disk, (34) possible secondary bulge, (53) partial arms or shells.

 

The team of astronomers had expected to find ellipticals (large, mature galaxies) in searching NED, but instead they happened upon this new discovery. This came after sampling around 800,000 galaxies, all within 3.5 billion light-years from the Earth, they found that the most luminous galaxies here not elliptical in shape, but rather spiral.

 

A distinct trait observed in 4 of the 53 super spirals discovered by the team is that they contain two galactic nuclei, potentially hinting at the origin of such galaxies—a collision of epic proportions.

 

As the team notes, “double nuclei are a telltale sign of two galaxies having just merged together. Conventionally, mergers of spiral galaxies are destined to become bloated, elliptical galaxies,” but the merging of two gas-rich galaxies could possibly lead to their combined gases settling into a super spiral.

 

This discovery changes conventional understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve. Their study is published in the Astrophysical Journal.

 

SourcE

[jamesDDI]

How can go there and Stay there with no come back? 

[Jordan]

8 hours ago, jamesDDI said:

How can go there and Stay there with no come back? 

 

Galactus would say no but i'll see what i can do for you james ,-)

 

[pc71520]

14 hours ago, jamesDDI said:

How can go there and Stay there with no come back? 

No come back?

[Fallon]

On 3/21/2016 at 10:57 PM, F3dupsk1Nup said:

 “double nuclei are a telltale sign of two galaxies having just merged together.

Note the word 'just', because one would expect that gravity doing what it does, a collision will lead to a merger of the massive black holes too.

 

On 3/21/2016 at 0:33 AM, jamesDDI said:

How can go there and Stay there with no come back?

Remember, these are images from the past, because of the 'up to 3.5 billion years' the light had to travel to reach us. As far as we know, we cannot travel in time to the past, because common radiation would destroy a stretched wormhole immediately. But we can travel to the future. Just step on your bike and go faster than the speed of light and presto you will travel in time! Particals observed in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have done it.