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Warped Galaxy Devours Neighbor, Spawns New Stars
By Heather Sparks
Staff Writer
posted: 09:01 am ET
02 August 2001
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warped_galaxy2_010802More than a billion years ago ESO 510-G13 was a spiral galaxy similar in shape to our own Milky Way, but now it writhes in the aftermath of a head-on galactic collision. The neighbor that is no longer there left only its dust-laden gases which set millions of stars ablaze and crumpled ESO 510-G13 so much that it bears a many-light-year-long twisting deformation right in its center. The concept of birth from violence is nothing new to astronomers: the Universe started with a Big Bang after all. But the concept of collisions between all galaxies, all the time, is a bit alarming. "It could well be that collisions like these play a role in the formation of stars of various ages, and that all galaxies are in the process of colliding," said Keith Noll, a scientist with the Space Science Telescope Institute (STScI) which analyzes Hubble space telescope data. Chris Conselice, also at STScI, said this universal appetite for destruction must include galaxies in our neck of the woods as well. Conselice said that evidence suggests that even our own Milky Way and its nearest neighbors, the Megallanic Cloud and the Andromeda galaxy, are involved in a cosmic crash similar to ESO 510G13's that will warp, or already has warped, our home galaxy. The popular belief that the Milky Way is a regular, flat spiral disc is unlikely, Conselice said, but we have no way of knowing because we're inside it. But the Hubble Telescope has yielded insights with its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 which took its 100,000 photograph of this warped galaxy that lies 150 million light years away in the Southern Sky. Those images have allowed scientists to discover that bumps and bruises on galaxies are not uncommon at all. But most deformations are not as extreme as that of ESO 510-G13, Conselice said. "Gravity between the galaxies changes the disc, but the warp must depend on the strength of the interaction and how long ago it happened," he said. The interaction, he theorized, had to have happened relatively recently in the past billion years, and would have either been a merger of two galaxies or a hit and run. Eventually, said Conselice, ESO 510-G13 will evolve into another galaxy shape altogether, or flatten out again, a fate that will likely befall the Milky Way as well.
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