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Flies in a spider's web: Galaxy caught in the making
October 12, 2006In nature spiders earn our respect by constructing fascinating, well-organised webs in all shapes and sizes. But the beauty masks a cruel, fatal trap. Analogously, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found a large galaxy 10.6 billion light-years away from Earth (at a redshift of 2.2) that is stuffing itself with smaller galaxies caught like flies in a web of gravity. The galaxy is so far away that astronomers are seeing it as it looked in the early formative years of the Universe, only 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
The Hubble image shows the Spiderweb Galaxy sitting at the centre of an emergent galaxy cluster, surrounded by hundreds of other galaxies from the cluster.
Team leader George Miley from Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands explains: "The new Hubble image is the best demonstration so far that large massive galaxies are built up by merging smaller ones." The image reaches much deeper than previous ones and shows the merging process in unprecedented detail. Galaxies can be seen as they are sucked into the Spiderweb at speeds of several hundred kilometres per second, from distances of more than a hundred thousand light-years around it.
Radio telescopes have shown that jets of fast particles are being spewed out from the centre of the Spiderweb Galaxy with enormous energies. These jets are believed to be produced by a massive black hole buried deep in the nucleus of the system. The infalling galaxy "flies" are a source of food for this black hole "spider", allowing it to continue disgorging the jets.
The new Hubble image provides a unique real-world example for testing theoretical models of massive galaxy formation. The complexity and clumpiness of the Spiderweb agrees qualitatively with the predictions of such models, but a surprising feature of the Spiderweb Galaxy is the presence of several faint small linear galaxies within the merging structure.
The Spiderweb Galaxy is located in the southern constellation of Hydra (the water snake) and is one of the most massive galaxies known.
This result was published 10th October 2006 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
ESA/Hubble Information Centre
Radio telescopes have shown that jets of fast particles are being spewed out from the centre of the Spiderweb Galaxy with enormous energies. These jets are believed to be produced by a massive black hole buried deep in the nucleus of the system. The infalling galaxy "flies" are a source of food for this black hole "spider", allowing it to continue disgorging the jets.
The new Hubble image provides a unique real-world example for testing theoretical models of massive galaxy formation. The complexity and clumpiness of the Spiderweb agrees qualitatively with the predictions of such models, but a surprising feature of the Spiderweb Galaxy is the presence of several faint small linear galaxies within the merging structure.
The Spiderweb Galaxy is located in the southern constellation of Hydra (the water snake) and is one of the most massive galaxies known.
This result was published 10th October 2006 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
ESA/Hubble Information Centre
Galaxy Current Events and Galaxy News RSSWatching a Cannibal Galaxy Dine
A new technique using near-infrared images, obtained with ESO's 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT), allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes of the giant cannibal galaxy Centaurus A, unveiling its "last meal" in unprecedented detail - a smaller spiral galaxy, currently twisted and warped.
Baffling boxy bulge
When targeting spiral galaxy bulges, astronomers often seek edge-on galaxies, as their bulges are more easily distinguishable from the disc.
Rapid star formation spotted in 'stellar nurseries' of infant galaxies
The Universe's infant galaxies enjoyed rapid growth spurts forming stars like our sun at a rate of up to 50 stars a year, according to scientists at Durham University.
Swift XMM-Newton Satellites Tune Into a Middleweight Black Hole
While astronomers have studied lightweight and heavyweight black holes for decades, the evidence for black holes with intermediate masses has been much harder to come by.
'Dropouts' pinpoint earliest galaxies
Astronomers, conducting the broadest survey to date of galaxies from about 800 million years after the Big Bang, have found 22 early galaxies and confirmed the age of one by its characteristic hydrogen signature at 787 million years post Big Bang.
VERITAS telescopes help solve 100-year-old mystery: The origin of cosmic rays
Nearly 100 years ago, scientists detected the first signs of cosmic rays - subatomic particles (mostly protons) that zip through space at nearly the speed of light.
Iowa State researchers contribute to discovery of gamma rays from starburst galaxy
Iowa State University astrophysicists contributed to the recent discovery that a galaxy quickly creating new stars is also a source of high energy gamma rays.
Starburst galaxy sheds light on longstanding cosmic mystery
An international collaboration that includes scientists from the University of Delaware's Bartol Research Institute in the Department of Physics and Astronomy has discovered very-high-energy gamma rays in the Cigar Galaxy (M82), a bright galaxy filled with exploding stars 12 million light years from Earth.
NASA's Fermi Telescope Detects Gamma-Ray From
Nearby galaxies undergoing a furious pace of star formation also emit lots of gamma rays, say astronomers using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
Shedding light on the cosmic skeleton
"Matter is not distributed uniformly in the Universe," says Masayuki Tanaka from ESO, who led the new study. "In our cosmic vicinity, stars form in galaxies and galaxies usually form groups and clusters of galaxies. The most widely accepted cosmological theories predict that matter also clumps on a larger scale in the so-called 'cosmic web', in which galaxies, embedded in filaments stretching between voids, create a gigantic wispy structure."
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