Employees of the State Astronomical Institute of Moscow State University, as part of an international group of scientists, have discovered very exotic galaxies.Their
greatly increases the rate of formation of new stars.Understanding the workings of such an unstable system will allow scientists to learn more about the formation of galaxies at the earliest stages and their further evolution. The results of the study are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
In general, spiral galaxies most often havea disk of gas whose movement and rotation coincides with that of a star. In the most extreme case, it comes out, curving, out of its plane in the outer parts. This is what happens in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The process is dynamically stable and persists for billions of years.
However, the inclination of the gas disk to the stellaris much less common. Calculations show that the matter in such a disk should fall off after a few revolutions and remain rotating in the main stellar disk. The closest example is NGC 660, a barred spiral galaxy with a polar ring located in the constellation Pisces. This object is one of those listed in the original edition of the New General Catalog.
Photo: NASA
There are two gaseous disks there: an inner one, coinciding with the star, and an inclined outer one, the result of the gravitational capture of matter from a nearby satellite.
An international team of scientists, which includedemployees of the SAI of Moscow State University, discovered even more exotic systems - two galaxies in which both spatially mismatched gas disks do not coincide with the star. This configuration will also not be stable - although one gas disk is nested in another, there is a region of their contact where the gas masses collide. Observations show that this collision leads to an increase in the speed
the formation of stars from condensed gas.
Photo: Nature
To detect such systems, astronomershad to analyze the distribution of velocities of gas and stars in almost 10,000 galaxies. Their maps were compiled as part of the SDSS / MaNGA project. An analysis of the optical spectra made it possible to examine in detail the features of the motion of matter in galaxies, the state of gas ionization, and the parameters of the stellar population.
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Cover photo: NGC 660, Gemini Observatory, AURA