California Institute of Technology | W.M. Keck Observatory | 2019 Jul 01
New data from W. M. Keck Observatory show gas directly spiraling into growing galaxies
Galaxies grow by accumulating gas from their surroundings and converting it to stars, but the details of this process have remained murky. New observations, made using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, now provide the clearest, most direct evidence yet that filaments of cool gas spiral into young galaxies, supplying the fuel for stars.Click to play embedded YouTube video.
“For the first time, we are seeing filaments of gas directly spiral into a galaxy. It’s like a pipeline going straight in,” says Christopher Martin ... “This pipeline of gas sustains star formation, explaining how galaxies can make stars on very fast timescales.”
For years, astronomers have debated exactly how gas makes its way to the center of galaxies. Does it heat up dramatically as it collides with the surrounding hot gas? Or does it stream in along thin dense filaments, remaining relatively cold? “Modern theory suggests that the answer is probably a mix of both, but proving the existence of these cold streams of gas had remained a major challenge until now,” says co-author Donal O’Sullivan ...
KCWI, designed and built at Caltech, is a state-of-the-art spectral imaging camera. Called an integral-field unit spectrograph, it allows astronomers to take images such that every pixel in the image contains a dispersed spectrum of light. Installed at Keck in early 2017, KCWI is the successor to the Cosmic Web Imager (CWI), an instrument that has operated at Palomar Observatory near San Diego since 2010. KCWI has eight times the spatial resolution and 10 times the sensitivity of CWI. ...
Multi-Filament Inflows Fueling Young Star Forming Galaxies ~ D. Christopher Martin et al
- Nature Astronomy (online 01 July 2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0791-2
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1904.11465 > 25 Apr 2019 (v1), 26 Apr 2019 (v2)