Home Science A Cluster of Galaxies Found Swarming Around A Giant Galaxy

A Cluster of Galaxies Found Swarming Around A Giant Galaxy

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Credit: Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash

Galaxy clusters have been found to circle a distant, ultraluminous galaxy that is creating stars at an extreme pace, providing evidence that early galaxies developed in packed surroundings.

The center galaxy, designated W0410-0913, may be receiving gas and stars via its interactions with these satellite galaxies, allowing it to expand to a size 10 times that of the Milky Way. To the contrary, the study’s authors showed that the galaxies in question don’t contribute nearly as much disorder to W0410-0913 as was previously believed.

The results may provide light on how active galactic nuclei, which are fuelled by supermassive black holes, get so brilliant and how quasars come to be housed there.

These enormous cosmic monsters emit an incredible amount of light as they devour gas, dust, and even stars, eventually becoming brighter than all of the stars in their home galaxy.

One of the most luminous, massive, and gas-rich galaxies is W0410-0913. Light’s lengthy journey to Earth means we see the galaxy as it was 12 billion years ago, when the cosmos was just 2 billion years old. Specifically, it belongs to the group of galaxies known as “hot Dust-Obscured Galaxies” (or “hot DOGs” for short).

Large clouds of dust inside these galaxies are heated by sunlight and by energy from the core black hole, causing gas to glow and radiate infrared light, thus the name.

Both the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), both of which are managed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, were used to make the observations of W0410-0913. It wasn’t that Ginolfi and his team weren’t interested in studying W0410-0913; it’s simply that they didn’t want to do it in a vacuum. Taking into account the role that a galaxy’s environment may play in its development, the team used the VLT’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument to examine an area of W0410-0913 that was 40 times wider than the galaxy itself.