A new and special galaxy has recently been discovered, which significantly changes the way we think about this celestial system. It's called J0613+52 and is about 270 million light years away from Earth. What makes the J0613+52 galaxy special is that has no star, or at least, no star is visible. It's like a fog, made of the kind of gas that is found between stars in normal galaxies.
Its mass and movement seem to be indicative of a spiral galaxybut they don't seem stars as in classical spiral galaxies.
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According to a team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Karen O'Neil of Green Bank Observatory...we may be facing the first discovery of a primordial galaxy in the nearby Universe - of a galaxy composed mainly of the gas that formed at the beginning of creation.
Η its discovery was accidental and presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The researchers used the Green Bank Observatory to search for and study galaxies known as low surface brightness or LSB. They are mostly small galaxies dwarf, which do not emit much light because most of them are made up of gas and dark matter. Compared to other galaxies, they have very few stars.
The researchers used the Green Bank and two other telescopes and watched the sky. But someone made a typo in the coordinates of the Green Bank, pointing it at a part of the sky that had not been examined before. There, the researchers found hydrogen gas, with power expected from a spiral galaxy. They even detected the Doppler shift of radio waves associated with galactic rotation.
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But there was no sign of stars in the Green Bank radio data. The object seemed isolated and undisturbed, as has not experienced gravitational interactions over 13.8 billion yearsthat would have disrupted the gaseither by tearing it apart or by pushing it into the clusters needed to activate significant star formation. This makes J0613+52 a galaxy unlike any other known object.
“What we do know is that it's an incredibly gas-rich galaxy", says O'Neil.
“It does not show star formation as we would expect, probably because its gas is very diffuse. At the same time, it is too far away from other galaxies to help trigger star formation through any encounter. J0613+52 appears to be undisturbed and underdeveloped. This could be our first discovery of a nearby galaxy composed of primordial gas“.
Unfortunately, this galaxy is very dark, making it difficult to study it further to discover possible stars. In addition, it appears to be rare, as it is the first of its kind to be detected. The researchers suggest that they need powerful radio telescopes to search for similar galaxies.
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However, J0613+52 could be the only galaxy of its kind, at least in the nearby space. A cloud of gas unchanged since the dawn of the Universe billions of years ago. There's no denying that this is a great discovery that can overturn existing theories about the creation and evolution of galaxies. We may have to rethink our ideas about how and why galaxies form, and the role of stars in this process.
This discovery may also have important implications for understanding of dark matter.
Finally, this galaxy may provide new information about the understanding the scattering of stars and galaxies in the universe. If galaxies can exist without stars, this could change our theories about how and where stars form.
Source : www.sciencealert.com
