Photo: ESO/A. Watts et al.
It blows huge amounts of gas into space. If this continues, there will be no gas left for the birth of new stars. The system then ends up as an inactive collection of aging stars.
NGC 4383, as the galaxy is called, was discovered in 1862 by the German astronomer Eduard Schönfeld. It is located 62 million light-years away in the Virgo cluster – a giant cluster of galaxies. Previous observations suggest that NGC 4383 is blowing 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. MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) stores each pixel in the image with hundreds of different colors. This provides information on the motion and composition of the gas and stars.
The composite image shows huge “fountains” of gas being blown up and down from the galactic core (right of center) to distances of up to 20,000 light-years. This happens at speeds of over two hundred kilometers per second. In total, NGC 4383 has already “lost” at least fifty million solar masses in this way.
The fountains are powered by stellar winds and supernova explosions in the galaxy’s core. The blown gas consists mainly of hydrogen – the building material of new stars. In the future, the star formation activity in the system will therefore decrease.
Never before have galactic fountains of this type been studied in such detail. In the future, astronomers hope to study many other galaxies, such as NGC 4383. The new results were published on April 22 Monthly Bulletins of the Royal Astronomical Society.