See what the most unusual galaxies look like

Space jellyfish

Galaxy ESO 137-001, located in the Southern Triangle constellation, is remarkably similar

to a jellyfish floating among a sea of ​​stars. It is a spiral galaxy by type, but bright blue “tentacles” are clearly visible in its photo.

According to NASA, they are composed of bright youngblue stars that form inside a tail of dust and gas (invisible to the naked eye) that flows from ESO 137-001. This star formation process is a bit cryptic, as the gas in the tail must be too hot to do so.

Spiral galaxy M104 or "sombrero"

This galaxy is known for its wide ringdust-absorbing and hat-like. The galaxy is represented in today's unique picture by images from three large space telescopes in different ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. Chandra's blue high-energy X-ray image indicates the presence of a rarefied hot gas that permeates throughout the galaxy, up to 60,000 light-years from the center.

In a green optical image from spaceThe Hubble Telescope shows the most familiar glow of the Sombrero stars. Among the stellar populations of the galaxy, a circumnuclear bulge stands out, which we see almost edge-on. A broad band of dust, which absorbs light in all other spectral bands, glows in infrared light in the yellow Spitzer telescope image. The Sombrero Galaxy is 28 million light-years away and lies at the southern edge of the extended Virgo galaxy cluster.

A galaxy without dark matter?

In 2018, the Hubble Space Telescope discoveredsomething unusual: a galaxy with almost no dark matter. This discovery immediately gave rise to a lot of controversy. Dark matter is a mysterious form of matter that interacts with gravity, but not light. It makes up most of all matter in the universe, so finding a galaxy without it was strange to say the least.

A year later, researchers uncovered the secret: galaxy NGC 1052-DF2, it turns out, was not 65 million light-years away as originally thought. The real distance to it is only about 42 million light years. This change in distance completely changes the original calculations of the galaxy's mass. And according to the new ones, it turns out that this is still a fairly typical galaxy, in which there is still dark matter.

Dead galaxy

Massive disk-shaped galaxy MACS2129-1 (onpicture on the right) rotates twice as fast as the Milky Way, but it is nowhere near as active. Observations by the Hubble Telescope show that it has not created stars for about 10 billion years.

MACS2129-1 is the object that is calleda "dead galaxy" because stars no longer form there. The discovery of this galaxy has created many questions. Scientists believed that these kinds of galaxies formed from the merger of small galaxies over time, but the stars of MACS 2129-1 did not form in these kinds of explosive mergers: they formed early in the development of the galaxy itself, in its parent disk. Results published in the journalNaturein 2017, suggest that dead galaxies somehow internally rearrange their structure as they age, rather than changing shape as they merge with other galaxies.

Cannibal galaxy

According to 2019 research, the galaxyAndromeda, Earth's largest neighbor, has been devouring smaller galaxies for at least 10 billion years. In another 4.5 billion years, the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way galaxy will collide, although it is not yet clear who will absorb whom in this truly cosmic duel. (Humanity will unfortunately miss this battle as our Sun heats up and will likely make life on Earth impossible in about 1.5 billion years.)

Vampire Galaxy

As you probably already understood above, galaxiesoften interact with each other, squeezing and stretching their neighbors in the most unpredictable directions, and also quietly “sucking” the stars out of them. One of the brightest galaxies in the Universe is such a vampire. The photo above shows W2246-0526 absorbing about half the mass of three neighboring galaxies.

Astronomers were able to observe streams of starsconnecting galaxies - at least as it was over 12 billion years ago, when light from them began its journey to Earth. This observation is the most distant direct snapshot of galactic cannibalism and the only known example of a galaxy sucking more than one neighbor at a time.

Blooming galaxy

This galaxy, 270 millionlight-years from Earth, located in the constellation Centaurus. It is a lenticular galaxy, a hybrid between a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way and an elongated elliptical galaxy.

However, what ESO 381-12 really does isweird— its jagged, flower-petal-like formations along the edges that emerge from the center of the galactic body, appearing to bloom. Astronomers aren't entirely sure what causes these structural changes at the edges of the galaxy. It is possible that these are shock waves from a relatively recent galactic collision, which also provided the galaxy with new fuel for star formation.

Two hearts

Most galaxies probably have in the centersupermassive black hole. However, in rare cases, there may be two of them. One of them is NGC 7674 (pictured above), a spiral galaxy centered on a pair of black holes a mere light-year away. The galaxy itself, located 600 million light-years from Earth, likely acquired another black hole during a collision and merger with another galaxy. The only other galaxy with two black holes in its heart is a supermassive galaxy called 0402 + 379.

Tilted galaxy

And the last one on our list is tiltedgalaxy or NGC 2188. Photo taken by the Hubble Telescope. At first glance, NGC 2188 appears to be composed entirely of a narrow strip of stars, which astronomers classify as a barred spiral galaxy. From our point of view on Earth, it looks like this because the center and spiral arms of the galaxy are tilted away from us, and we only see the very narrow outer edge of the galaxy's disk. Astronomers compare this case to turning a dinner plate in your hands so that you only see its outer edge.

NGC 2188 is estimated to be half of our Milky Way, 50,000 light-years across and located in the constellation Dove in the northern hemisphere.

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