When you first see a galaxy in a telescope, it will be almost impossible to confuse it with something else. Galaxies are bright densely populated objects consisting of many millions of stars attached to each other due to gravitational forces, often possessing the form of a sphere or spiral. However, astronomers have recently discovered a completely new type of galaxy, which they call “fluffy” or “smoky”. At the same time, scientists are not quite sure how this is possible at all.
Galaxy Dragonfy 44 (pictured below) is just one of these "fluffy" galaxies. It was discovered thanks to the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, as well as the Kek-1 telescope located on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea.
A group of astronomers compared data from two telescopes aimed at a cluster of Coma galaxies. Coma Cluster is located about 300 million light-years from us and is located in the constellation Volos of Veron, next to the constellation Leo. Unlike other galaxies in this cluster, the newly discovered galaxies resemble shapeless clouds rather than clearly defined cosmic structures. They are as big as our Milky Way galaxy (about 60,000 light-years along), but they contain only one percent of stars. Astronomers often call such galaxies super scattered.
According to scientists, galaxies of this type should not exist at all. If we, of course, truly understand the principle of galactic formations. Nevertheless, their existence makes us reconsider some of the hypotheses. And some researchers on this subject are already beginning to have new ideas. For example, astronomer Roberto Abraham of the University of Toronto, who works with the Keck Observatory, said in a statement:
“The big task for us is to determine where these amazing space objects, which are so incomprehensible for us, could come from. Are they "failed galaxies", which began their formation, but exhausted stocks of galactic material? Maybe they used to be ordinary galaxies? Or do they represent parts of larger galaxies that were once thrown out and lost in space? ”
Yane University astronomer Peter Van Dokkum, who led the study of super-scattered galaxies, says that the most amazing feature of these galaxies is that they managed to survive and not be torn apart:
“It's amazing that they could survive at all. They are found in dense, turbulent regions of space filled with dark matter and other galaxies, so we assume that they can be protected by some kind of their own invisible “dark matter” shield that protects them from the external intergalactic gap. ”
Aaron Romanowski, an astronomer from the University of California at San Jose, decided to imagine what life could be on planets located in such super-scattered galaxies:
“If there is life on some of the planets located inside the super-scattered galaxy, then, most likely, it could not observe the line of light in the night sky (as we, for example, can see our Milky Way), which would tell them that they live inside the galaxy. The night sky in this case turned out to be much poorer with regard to the presence of stars on it. ”
The article is based on materials .
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