A glimpse of the future

Arp 243, NGC 2623

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

This image, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows what happens when two galaxies become one. The twisted cosmic knot seen here is NGC 2623 — or Arp 243 — and is located about 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Cancer (The Crab).

NGC 2623 gained its unusual and distinctive shape as the result of a major collision and subsequent merger between two separate galaxies. This violent encounter caused clouds of gas within the two galaxies to become compressed and stirred up, in turn triggering a sharp spike of star formation. This active star formation is marked by speckled patches of bright blue; these can be seen clustered both in the centre and along the trails of dust and gas forming NGC 2623’s sweeping curves (known as tidal tails). These tails extend for roughly 50 000 light-years from end to end. Many young, hot, newborn stars form in bright stellar clusters — at least 170 such clusters are known to exist within NGC 2623.

NGC 2623 is in a late stage of merging. It is thought that the Milky Way will eventually resemble NGC 2623 when it collides with our neighbouring galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, in four billion years time.

In contrast to the image of NGC 2623 released in 2009 (heic0912), this new version contains data from recent narrow-band and infrared observations that make more features of the galaxy visible.

 Source: ESA/Hubble/Potw

The galaxies NGC 2623 in the final stages of their titanic merger. The violent encounter has produced widespread star formation. A systematic new study of galaxy simulations examines where in merging systems the star formation activity tends to take place. Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA, APOD; Processing - Martin Pugh

Collisions between galaxies, and even less dramatic gravitational encounters between them, are recognized as triggering star formation. Observations of luminous galaxies, powered by starbursts, are consistent with this conclusion. Numerical simulations also support this picture, with gravity funneling copious amounts of gas into the central regions of galaxies, fueling powerful bursts of star formation there. But starbursts are not ubiquitous in interacting galaxies. Triggering therefore depends on many factors, including the specific merger geometry (how they come together), the properties of the progenitor galaxies (how much gas is available for new stars), and time-scale (maybe the starburst has yet to happen, or has finished?)

CfA astronomer Lars Hernquist and six colleagues computed seventy-five simulated galaxy collisions under a wide range of conditions in order to investigate the question of where the induced star formation is located. Observational tests of this property are difficult to make because many of the most interesting cases are far enough away that individual regions can’t easily be distinguished for study. For the same reason, it is often hard to tell in which of the two merging galaxies (or both?) the starburst take place.

The results of these simulations were clear: the interactions enhanced the star formation activity in the centers of galaxies, and in particular in roughly the central ten thousand light-years. (By way of comparison, our Sun is about twenty-five thousand light-years away from the Milky Way’s center.) The scientists discovered several other important effects about the star formation as well: it was actually suppressed in the outer regions of the galaxies (depending on the merger geometry); at later merger stages it often formed a ring around the central zone, and its strength was critically dependent on whether the rotations of the galaxies were in the same direction (star formation enhanced) or opposite (star formation suppressed). The new generation of telescopes under construction should have the capability of improving the observations, and this theoretical work will help guide the new research.

 Reference(s)

"Mapping Galaxy Encounters in Numerical Simulations: The Spatial Extent of Induced Star Formation," Jorge Moreno, Paul Torrey, Sara L. Ellison, David R. Patton, Asa F. L. Bluck, Gunjan Bansal, and Lars Hernquist, MNRAS 448, 1107, 2015.

Source: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

Sky merger yields sparkling dividends

Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Evans
(Stony Brook University, New York)

A recent NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures what appears to be one very bright and bizarre galaxy, but is actually the result of a pair of spiral galaxies that resemble our own Milky Way smashing together at breakneck speeds. The product of this dramatic collision, called NGC 2623, or Arp 243, is about 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Cancer (the Crab).

Not surprisingly, interacting galaxies have a dramatic effect on each other. Studies have revealed that as galaxies approach one another massive amounts of gas are pulled from each galaxy towards the centre of the other, until ultimately, the two merge into one massive galaxy. The object in the image, NGC 2623, is in the late stages of the merging process with the centres of the original galaxy pair now merged into one nucleus. However, stretching out from the centre are two tidal tails of young stars showing that a merger has taken place. During such a collision, the dramatic exchange of mass and gases initiates star formation, seen here in both the tails.

The prominent lower tail is richly populated with bright star clusters — 100 of them have been found in these observations. The large star clusters that the team have observed in the merged galaxy are brighter than the brightest clusters we see in our own vicinity. These star clusters may have formed as part of a loop of stretched material associated with the northern tail, or they may have formed from debris falling back onto the nucleus. In addition to this active star-forming region, both galactic arms harbour very young stars in the early stages of their evolutionary journey.

Some mergers (including NGC 2623) can result in an active galactic nucleus, where one of the supermassive black holes found at the centres of the two original galaxies is stirred into action. Matter is pulled toward the black hole, forming an accretion disc. The energy released by the frenzied motion heats up the disc, causing it to emit across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum.

NGC 2623 is so bright in the infrared that it belongs to the group of very luminous infrared galaxies (LIRG) and has been extensively studied as the part of the Great Observatories All-sky LIRG Survey (GOALS) project that combines data from some of the most advanced space-based telescopes, including Hubble. Additional data from infrared and X-ray telescopes can further characterise objects like active galactic nuclei and nuclear star formation by revealing what is unseen at visible wavelengths.

The GOALS project includes data from NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX). The joint efforts of these powerful observing facilities have provided a clearer picture of our local Universe.

This data used for this colour composite were taken in 2007 by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard Hubble. The observations were led by astronomer Aaron S. Evans. A team of over 30 astronomers, including Evans, recently published an important overview paper, detailing the first results of the GOALS project. Observations from ESA's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton) telescope contributed to the astronomers' understanding of NGC 2623.

Notes for editors:

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

Image credit: NASA, ESA and A. Evans (Stony Brook University, New York & National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, USA)

Links:

GOALS
NGC 2623 paper
GOALS overview paper

Contacts:

Colleen Sharkey
Hubble/ESA, Garching, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6306
Cell: +49 151 153 73591
E-mail: csharkey@eso.org

Aaron S. Evans
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, USA
Tel: +1-434-924-4896
E-mail: aevans@virginia.edu