Posted on 09/07/2018 7:29:12 AM PDT by ETL
A remarkable ring of bright X-ray sources — black holes or neutron stars — has been discovered in a galaxy approximately 300 million light years from Earth. This ring was forged when one galaxy smashed through the middle of another, creating ripples in the gas.
“Where did the ring of black holes or neutron stars in this galaxy — the so-called ring galaxy AM 0644-741 — come from? We think that it was created when one galaxy was pulled into another galaxy by the force of gravity,” said Dr. Anna Wolter of the Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera and co-authors.
“The first galaxy generated ripples in the gas of the second galaxy, AM 0644-741, located in the lower right. These ripples then produced an expanding ring of gas in AM 0644-741 that triggered the birth of new stars. The first galaxy is possibly the one located in the lower left of the image.”
The most massive of these fledgling stars will lead short lives of millions of years.
After that, their nuclear fuel is spent and the stars explode as supernovas leaving behind either black holes with masses about 5-20 times that of the Sun, or neutron stars with a mass approximately equal to that of the Sun.
“Some of these black holes or neutron stars have close companion stars, and siphon gas from their stellar partner,” the astronomers said.
“This gas falls towards the black hole or neutron star, forming a spinning disk like water circling a drain, and becomes heated by friction.”
“This superheated gas produces large amounts of X-rays that NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory can detect.”
(Excerpt) Read more at sci-news.com ...
And a ring galaxy really does look like a ring. There’s a bright central core, and then a large gap without much luminous matter, and then a bright ring containing hot, blue stars.
Astronomers think that ring galaxies are formed when a smaller galaxy passes through the center of a larger galaxy. The space between stars in a galaxy is vast, so when galaxies collide, the stars don’t actually crash into each other. Instead, it’s their gravity that makes a mess. In this situation, it’s thought that the smaller galaxy slices right through the disk of the larger galaxy. The gravity of the smaller galaxy collapses vast clouds of gas and dust, and creates a burst of star formation around the edge of the larger galaxy.
The change in gravity drastically affects the orbit of the stars in the larger galaxy. They orbit outward and bunch up into the bright starforming ring. This blue ring is continuing to expand outward, and astronomers believe that it only lasts for a few hundred million years before it begins disintegrating. Eventually only the bright galaxy core will remain.
In 2004, astronomers released an image of the ring galaxy AM 0644-741 to celebrate 14 years of service by the Hubble Space Telescope.
We have written many articles about galaxies for Universe Today. Here’s an article about a ring galaxy imaged by Hubble.
I've been reading up on neutron stars and black holes lately.
The things we don't know about the universe would fill..... the universe.
Given the distance and their estimates, that galaxy now looks dramatically different in-person than it does to our telescopes.
Robert Reich must have gone extra terrestrial during the last dwarf-toss.
Here’s a link to a super-high resolution APOD image of the Ring Galaxy...
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1504/Ring0644_hubble_3628.jpg
Have you read about the neutron star and black hole collisions observed by LIGO with gravity waves?
Yes though I must admit I'm much more into electromagnetic radiation.
Have you ever heard of Eric Learner or youtube "thunderboltsproject"? They are a bunch of naysayers. I read Eric Holder's book "The Bang Did Not Happen". I was amused to see him on youtube because he is a cross between Bill Nye and Christopher Walken.
This detection by LIGO was also observed in the electromagnetic spectrum:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW170817
Through EMR a wealth of information can be obtained from remote objects in the universe: temperature, rotation, proper motion, chemistry, magnetic properties, on and on. We're very lucky it works the way it does, else we wouldn't know much at all.
Agreed.
And what we are seeing now is not the present, but the past. Maybe millions of years ago. Begs the question: what does it look like now.
What about in the case of objects billions of light years out where the radiation we receive is red-shifted, sometimes significantly. In other words, what we, for example, may perceive in the optical may have actually been emitted in the ultraviolet.
It doesn't really matter, no one will ever see its current state.
I guess I hadn’t read such a good write up of the event. Thanks for the link.
Yup. The universe is in motion. :)
I presume that scientists would know this and be able to adjust the data accordingly and that they can still do a spectral analysis. Just that elemental peaks are equally “red shifted.”
You can probably project an object's path based on its speed and direction.
Thanks ETL.
Absolutely. The more we look, the more complex things get.
“Some of these black holes or neutron stars have close companion stars, and siphon gas from their stellar partner,” the astronomers said.
“This gas falls towards the black hole or neutron star, forming a spinning disk like water circling a drain...
So the Black holes or neutron stars must be spinning themselves to create this sort of Coriolis effect?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
