This Galaxy Is Blowing ‘Giant Fountains’ Into Space

Image: ESO/A. Watts et al.

It is blowing huge amounts of gas into space. If this continues, there will be no gas left to create new stars. The system will then end up as an inactive cluster of old stars.

NGC 4383, as the galaxy is called, was discovered in 1862 by German astronomer Eduard Schoenfeld. It is located 62 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster, a huge swarm of galaxies. Previous observations had suggested that NGC 4383 was spewing out a lot of gas.

An international team of astronomers led by Adam Watts (University of Western Australia) has now studied the system in detail using the MUSE instrument on the European Very Large Telescope in northern Chile. Consider (Multi-unit spectrograph) captures each pixel in the image in hundreds of different colors. This provides information about the motion and composition of gas and stars.

The composite image shows massive “jets” of gas blasting up and down from the galaxy’s core (right of center) to distances of up to 20,000 light-years. This is happening at speeds of more than two hundred kilometers per second. In all, NGC 4383 has already lost at least fifty million solar masses of gas in this way.

The jets are powered by stellar winds and supernova explosions in the galaxy’s core. The jets are mainly composed of hydrogen, the building material for new stars. Consequently, in the future, star formation activity in the system will decline.

Never before have these types of galactic fountains been studied in such detail. In the future, astronomers hope to study more galaxies like NGC 4383. The new results were published on April 22. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.