Astronomers took a picture of the cosmic ring of fire

Astronomers took a picture of the cosmic ring of fire
Astronomers took a picture of the cosmic ring of fire
Anonim

A round galaxy, about the mass of the Milky Way, with a hole in the middle, and looking like a huge donut. Her discovery is described in the journal Nature Astronomy and is intended to stir up theories about the earliest formation of galactic structures and their development.

“This is a very curious object that we have never seen before,” said lead researcher Tiantian Yuan of the Australian Center for Advanced Astrophysics in 3D ARC (ASTRO 3-D). "Looks strange and familiar at the same time."

Galaxy R5519 lies 11 billion light years from the solar system. The hole in the center is indeed massive, with a diameter of 2 billion times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. It is 3 million times the diameter of the supermassive black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy, which was photographed in 2019.

“The stars in this galaxy appear 50 times faster than in the Milky Way,” Yuan said. "Most of this activity takes place in the ring - so it really is a ring of fire."

Image
Image

Working with colleagues in Australia, the United States, Canada, Belgium and Denmark, Dr. Yuan used spectroscopic data collected by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and images from the Hubble Space Telescope to identify the unusual structure.

The findings show that this is a collision ring galaxy - the first to be discovered in the early Universe.

There are two types of ring galaxies. The more common species is formed due to internal processes in the galaxy. The second, collisional, is formed as a result of gigantic and violent collisions with other galaxies. In the local Universe, they are 1000 times rarer than the first species. The much more distant galaxy R5519 was captured just 3 billion years after the Big Bang, roughly 10.8 billion years ago. They indicate that collisional ring galaxies are more unusual.

ASTRO 3D co-author Dr. Ahmed Elagali of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research in Western Australia said the study of R5519 would help determine when spiral galaxies began to develop.

Another co-author, Professor Kenneth Freeman of the Australian National University, said the discovery has implications for understanding the formation of galaxies like the Milky Way.

“The formation of collisional ring galaxies requires a thin disk in one of the galaxies before the collision occurs,” he explained. "The thin disk is the defining component of spiral galaxies: prior to its reassembly, galaxies were in a disordered state, not yet similar to spiral galaxies."

“By studying this ring galaxy, we are looking into the early universe 11 billion years ago, at a time when thin disks were just gathering. By comparison, the Milky Way's thin disk began to collect just about 9 billion years ago. This discovery suggests that the emergence of disks in spiral galaxies took place over a longer period than previously thought,”the authors are convinced.

Recommended: