Galaxies are the universe's biggest single objects, and the genesis of their development is a long-standing mystery with no clear explanations. This difficulty has been solved, according to a significant research published this week in The Astrophysical Journal of the American Astronomical Society.
Astronomers from The University of Manchester, lead by Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy Christopher Conselice, have discovered that merging is one of the most common mechanisms by which galaxies form.
This decade-long study of galaxies and how they evolved over the past 10 billion years has come to a conclusion, indicating that galaxy mergers are one of the most essential techniques for producing galaxies. Over the last 10 billion years, the typical big galaxy has undergone three mergers with other galaxies, more than doubling its mass. As a result of this research, we may conclude that mergers are a very successful mechanism for galaxies to originate.
Professor Conselice added, "This also shows that our own Milky Way galaxy has likely suffered at least one of these big mergers over its history, significantly changing its structure and formation history." "Mergers like the ones in our study promote star formation and feed the materials that generates core black holes, which might be the origin event for how stars like our own Sun created."
In the neighboring cosmos, galaxies come in diverse forms and sizes. Some of them, like our own, are huge, with trillions of stars and a spiral structure. Others are massive clusters of stars with no discernible patterns and a spheroidal or ellipsoidal shape. The vast majority of the history of these massive systems is unknown.
When two galaxies collide to form a totally new galaxy, a process known as merging, one method in which galaxies might expand in mass is through merging. Galaxy mergers have been recognized for more than a half-century, but their significance in generating the giant galaxies we see today has remained a huge enigma and a key cosmological conundrum. While this is a popular theoretical concept, we could only guess at how the process actually worked in the past.
The findings of this study come from a 10-billion-year search for galaxies in "pairs," or those that are close together. Over the course of a billion years, these nearby galaxies will eventually combine to form a new system. This study determined the merger history, and consequently the creation history of galaxies in the cosmos, by capturing these galaxies in the merging process. Prior to this study, there were largely only theoretical estimations available. This research is a direct reflection of the process.
According to Conselice, "Due to the total number of galaxies in the universe, about 2 trillion of these merging events would have happened over the previous 10 billion years. Because they are the most prevalent huge coalescence events in the cosmos, many of these events will be observable with subsequent gravitational wave experiments."
This hitherto unknown past now enables us to comprehend galaxies in ways we never could before. The ramifications of this discovery for understanding the creation of new stars and black holes in galaxies across this cosmic period will be revealed in future study by this team and others.
Galaxies are the universe's biggest single objects, and the genesis of their development is a long-standing mystery with no clear explanations. This difficulty has been solved, according to a significant research published this week in the Astrophysical Journal of the American Astronomical Society.
Astronomers from The University of Manchester, lead by Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy Christopher Conselice, have discovered that merging is one of the most common mechanisms by which galaxies form.
This decade-long study of galaxies and how they evolved over the past 10 billion years has come to a conclusion, indicating that galaxy mergers are one of the most essential techniques for producing galaxies. Over the last 10 billion years, the typical big galaxy has undergone three mergers with other galaxies, more than doubling its mass. As a result of this research, we may conclude that mergers are a very successful mechanism for galaxies to originate.
Professor Conselice added, "This also shows that our own Milky Way galaxy has likely suffered at least one of these big mergers over its history, significantly changing its structure and formation history." "Mergers like the ones in our study promote star formation and feed the materials that generates core black holes, which might be the origin event for how stars like our own Sun created."
Professor Conselice added, "This also shows that our own Milky Way galaxy has likely suffered at least one of these big mergers over its history, significantly changing its structure and formation history." "Mergers like the ones in our study promote star formation and feed the materials that generates core black holes, which might be the origin event for how stars like our own Sun created."
When two galaxies collide to form a totally new galaxy, a process known as merging, one method in which galaxies might expand in mass is through merging. Galaxy mergers have been recognized for more than a half-century, but their significance in generating the giant galaxies we see today has remained a huge enigma and a key cosmological conundrum. While this is a popular theoretical concept, we could only guess at how the process actually worked in the past.
The findings of this study are the outcome of a 10-billion-year search for galaxies that are in pairs. Over the course of a billion years, these nearby galaxies will eventually combine to form a new system. This study determined the merger history, and consequently the creation history of galaxies in the cosmos, by capturing these galaxies in the merging process. Prior to this study, there were largely only theoretical estimations available. This research is a direct reflection of the process.
"Due to the total number of galaxies in the cosmos, around 2 trillion of these merging events would have occurred during the previous 10 billion years," Conselice added. Because they are the most prevalent huge coalescence events in the cosmos, many of these events will be observable with subsequent gravitational wave experiments."
This hitherto unknown past now enables us to comprehend galaxies in ways we never could before. The ramifications of this discovery for understanding the creation of new stars and black holes in galaxies across this cosmic period will be revealed in future study by this team and others.
Carl Mundy and Leonardo Ferreira from the University of Nottingham, as well as Kenneth Duncan from the University of Edinburgh, are among the study's other participants.
