Low-mass galaxies are known to form stars at a slower pace, but now we see that they also made their bars slowly over time," he said.ĬOSMOS covers an area of sky nine times larger than the full Moon, surveying 10 times more spiral galaxies than previous observations. "We know that evolution is generally faster for more massive galaxies: They form their stars early and fast and then fade into red disks. The findings, Sheth continued, have important ramifications for galaxy evolution. "They are forming mostly in the small, low-mass galaxies, whereas among the most massive galaxies, the fraction of bars was the same in the past as it is today." "The recently forming bars are not uniformly distributed across galaxy masses, however, and this is a key finding from our investigation," Sheth explained. This new detailed look at the history of bar formation, made with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, provides clues to understanding when and how spiral galaxies formed and evolved over time.Ī team led by Kartik Sheth of the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena discovered that only 20 percent of the spiral galaxies in the distant past possessed bars, compared with nearly 70 percent of their modern counterparts.īars have been forming steadily over the last 7 billion years, more than tripling in number. The observations are part of the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS). The study's results confirm the idea that bars are a sign of galaxies reaching full maturity as the "formative years" end. In a landmark study of more than 2,000 spiral galaxies from the largest galaxy census conducted by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers found that so-called barred spiral galaxies were far less plentiful 7 billion years ago than they are today, in the local universe. A frequent sign of the maturity of a spiral galaxy is the formation of a ribbon of stars and gas that slices across the nucleus, like the slash across a "no smoking" sign.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |