Rare Galaxy Found Furiously Burning Fuel for Stars

Scientific Computing ^ | Tuesday, April 23, 2013 | McGill University

[SunkenCiv]

Astronomers have found a galaxy turning gas into stars with almost 100 percent efficiency, a rare phase of galaxy evolution that is the most extreme yet observed. The findings come from the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

"Galaxies burn gas like a car engine burns fuel. Most galaxies have fairly inefficient engines, meaning they form stars from their stellar fuel tanks far below the maximum theoretical rate," said Jim Geach of McGill University, lead author of a new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters...

The galaxy, called SDSSJ1506+54, jumped out at the researchers when they looked at it using data from WISE's all-sky infrared survey. Infrared light is pouring out of the galaxy, equivalent to more than a thousand billion times the energy of our sun.

[SunkenCiv]

The tiny red spot in this image is one of the most efficient star-making galaxies ever observed, converting gas into stars at the maximum possible rate. The galaxy is shown here in an image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which first spotted the rare galaxy in infrared light. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/IRAM

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks null and void.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks null and void.

---

---

· List topics · post a topic · subscribe · Google ·

---

[43north]

Oh big deal. American Idol turned gas into stars for a couple of years at least...

[GeronL]

Galaxy on Fire

[JRandomFreeper]

Here is a field of wild barley.

Here is a field of cultivated barley in Ireland.

Bottom line is someone is making hooch. Somewhere, out there...

/johnny

[SkyDancer]

Give it a minute and the Obama regime will find a way to tax it.

[ConorMacNessa]

And the result:



Uisge Baugh - Ireland's gift to the World!



"Riamh nár dhruid ó sbairn lann!"

Genuflectimus non ad principem sed ad Principem Pacis!

Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. (Isaiah 49:1 KJV)

[SkyDancer]

Give it a minute and the Obama regime will find a way to tax it.

[JRandomFreeper]

Water of life, indeed. My hair is still red.

An interesting thing showed up in some spectroscopic scans of nebula... C2H6O.

Someone out there has whiskey, but it's not in a jar. And they are making it in job lots.

/johnny

[BipolarBob]

That is one pissed off galaxy.

[Liberty Valance]

1960 Ford Galaxie Sunliner convertible

[rawcatslyentist]

G_d created all of this.

You tell him what can or can't be done....

[supercat]

I 'read' the audio book "The Disappearing Spoon", got an appreciation for how stars work. Gravity tries to compress matter close enough to cause nuclear fusion, but thermal kinetic energy will try to keep atoms apart. The higher the rate at which lighter atoms fuse, the more heat will be produced; the increasing temperatures will then serve to reduce the rate of fusion, which will in turn stabilize temperatures.

As the supplies of lighter elements get used up, temperatures drop, allowing pressures to grow high enough to fuse heavier elements. Each heavier element becomes less effective at producing heat, however, until iron is reached. Beyond that point, fusion ends up absorbing heat rather than producing it; at that point, the quasi-equilibrium between gravity and thermal kinetic energy completely breaks down, and the star's collapse accelerates until all the built-up energy gets released in a super nova which sends all sorts of stuff spewing every which way.

It's mind boggling to think that clouds of hydrogen can be dense enough to form together and start stellar furnaces, but sparse enough that the stars thus formed remain distinct. The scale of the phenomena involved is incomprehensible.

[dragonblustar]

And then there’s black holes......

[SgtHooper]

Careful! That didn’t go so well with Imus.

[Flick Lives]

The throttle must be stuck wide open on this galaxy.

[SunkenCiv]

It even gets well on the way to incomprehensible when we start comparing the sizes of the Solar System bodies, looking at distances, etc. Jupiter is about 318 times the mass of Earth but nearly 1300 times its volume, and the Sun is over 1000 times the mass of Jupiter. Kinda big, really. And Jupiter’s mass exceeds the combined mass of all other *currently known* bodies orbiting the Sun or orbiting objects which orbit the Sun.

[SunkenCiv]

Burn and peel, burn and peel...

[supercat]

And Jupiter’s mass exceeds the combined mass of all other *currently known* bodies orbiting the Sun or orbiting objects which orbit the Sun.

Incidentally, on the "what is a planet" front, I wonder how the amount of gravitation attraction Pluto exerts on the Sun compares with that exerted by anything else that's beyond Neptune's orbit? Even if there are larger objects further out, I would think that any of them exert a stronger pull than Pluto [given that gravitational pull falls off with the square of distance]. I wonder what fraction of people agree with the demotion of Pluto?