A galactic rejuvenation

28 October, 2024 / Read time: 3 minutes

Something odd is happening in NGC 1386, a spiral galaxy located 53 million light-years away in Eridanus's constellation. This Picture combines data from the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA) and the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. When astronomers observed the central regions of this galaxy, they found new stars forming… albeit in a peculiar way.

Stars often form within stellar clusters – groups of thousands of stars that originate from massive clouds of molecular gas. The blue ring at the center of this galaxy is ripe with stellar clusters full of young stars, as seen by VST. A new study led by Almudena Prieto, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, used data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to look at this ring in more detail. The data shows that all these star clusters formed almost simultaneously 4 million years ago. It is the first time synchronized star formation has been observed in a galaxy mainly containing old stars.

The same study used ALMA to reveal even more secrets in this galaxy. Shown in this picture as a golden ring is a multitude of gas clouds, ready to form a second batch of young stars. However, we will still have to wait 5 million years for these to be born. Even if old, NGC 1386 keeps rejuvenating itself.

Additional Information

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in Taiwan and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).

ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

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