An international team of astronomers - including a St Albans resident- have uncovered new insights into the shaping of galaxies.
Dr Jim Geach, 33 was part of a team that used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope to examine whether a galaxy that is compact enough and forming stars at a high rate, will produce the velocity without needing a central black hole.
The paper, led by Paul Sell from Texas Tech University in Lubbock analyses 12 galaxies, each at the final stage of a ‘merger’ - where two individual galaxies have collided.
The merger galaxies caused gas and stars to pile up at its centre, triggering new star formation. The study shows that these very compact galaxies are ejecting gas into space, caused by the energy from the new
central stars.
This gas is the fuel needed to make the future generation of stars. Once all of the gas is gone, these galaxies will rapidly turn into ‘passive’ galaxies composed of only aging stars.
Dr Jim Geach, 33, said: "We have discovered a remarkable class of galaxy that compared to the Milky Way is extremely compact and it has recently been forming stars hundreds of times faster.
"This phase of evolution is very brief, so these things are hard to find. Our analysis is providing key information on a poorly understood part of galaxy formation."
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