Berlin, 14 mar (EFE).-an international team of astronomers has discovered during his adolescence the galaxies changed their “eating habits” and became cannibals, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said from its headquarters in the town of Garching, South Germany.
More than one hundred hours of observations with the telescope of long-range (VLT, by its acronym in English) that, on Cerro Paranal, Chile, were keys to understanding the growth of galaxies in his teenage years, i.e. between three thousand and five thousand million years after the Big Bang.
So at the beginning of this phase the preferred aperitif of the galaxies were tenuous gas flows, but later its growth was due to cannibalism, that fed on other smaller galaxies.
“See how face two types of galaxies in growth: with violent events of merger in which larger galaxies devour the smaller, others feed on a soft continuous gas flow that falls on them”, explained the astronomer and leader of the team, Thierry Contini.
According to the scientist of the Institute of research in Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences of Toulouse, “both situations can lead to the creation of many new stars”.
“To understand how they grew and evolved galaxies need to look at them as accurately as possible,” said Contini, who added that an integral field spectrograph was used for observations in the near infrared, who “plays the same role as a microscope for a biologist”.
With the help of this powerful tool, the team picked up the largest number of detailed observations ever obtained from galaxies, distant and rich gas in this early stage of its development.
“For me, the biggest surprise was the discovery of many galaxies whose gas was not in rotation.” This type of galaxies are not seen in the nearby universe. “None of the current theory predicts these objects,” said Benoît Epinat, Laboratory astrophysics Marseille.
Contini, for his part, stressed that the team was not expected “that there were so many young galaxies in the poll who had heavy elements concentrated in its external parts”, which is “exactly the opposite of what is observed in the current galaxies”. EFE
