Subaru: Violent Wind from the Heart of a Galaxy Merger

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Subaru: Violent Wind from the Heart of a Galaxy Merger

Post by bystander » Thu Feb 04, 2016 2:28 pm

A Violent Wind Blown from the Heart of a Galaxy Tells the Tale of a Merger
Subaru Telescope | National Astronomical Observatory of Japan | 2016 Feb 03
An international team led by a researcher from Hiroshima University has succeeded in revealing the detailed structure of a massive ionized gas outflow streaming from the starburst galaxy NGC 6240. The team used the Suprime-Cam mounted on the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope on Maunakea in Hawaii.

The ionized gas the astronomers observed extends across 300,000 light-years and is carried out of the galaxy by a powerful superwind. That wind is driven by intense star-forming activity at the galactic center. The light-collecting power and high spatial resolution of Subaru Telescope made it possible to study, for the first time, the complex structure of one of the largest known superwinds being driven by starbirth – and star death. ...

NGC 6240 is a starburst galaxy fairly close to the Milky Way, at a distance of about 350 million light-years. Its SFR is estimated to be 25-80 times that of our galaxy. It has a peculiar, disturbed morphology which indicates that two spiral galaxies are merging. Due to the giant starburst at its heart as a result of the merger, NGC 6240 is very bright in infrared light being emitted from heated dust. The total infrared luminosity reaches almost a trillion times of that the Sun's.

NGC 6240 is an important object to investigate in order to understand the physical and evolutional relationship among the processes of galaxy merger, the action of a starburst, and the phenomenon of an active galactic nucleus. Hence, it is one of the most-studied starburst galaxies in the nearby universe within 500 million light-years of the Sun. ...

Giant Hα nebula surrounding the starburst merger NGC 6240 - Michitoshi Yoshida et al
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