International Center for Radio Astronomy Research | 2016 Feb 22
[c][attachment=0]Galaxy-Tail.jpg[/attachment][/c][hr][/hr]Astronomers have discovered a spectacular tail of gas more than 300,000 light-years across coming from a nearby galaxy. The plume is made up of hydrogen gas -- the material new stars are made of -- and is five times longer than the galaxy itself.
The discovery was made by an international team of scientists led by Dr. Alessandro Boselli at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in France, and published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research astrophysicist Luca Cortese, who is part of the research team, said scientists noticed long ago that the galaxy NGC 4569 contained less gas than expected but they could not see where it had gone.
“We didn’t have the smoking gun, the clear evidence of direct removal of gas from the galaxy,” he said. “Now, with these observations, we’ve seen a huge amount of gas that creates a stream trailing behind the galaxy for the first time. What’s very nice is that if you measure the mass of the stream, it’s the same amount of gas that is missing from the galaxy’s disc.” ...
Spectacular tails of ionised gas in the Virgo cluster galaxy NGC 4569 - A. Boselli et al
- Astronomy & Astrophysics 587:A68 (Mar 2016) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201527795
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1601.04978 > 19 Jan 2016 (v1), 21 Jan 2016 (v2)