深空视界
深空视界
Using a telescope in Chile, astronomers have captured a high-speed collision between two galaxies located more than 11 billion light-years away, getting a rare direct glimpse into how the universe's most luminous sources of energy, known as , can sculpt their surroundings and influence the evolution of galaxies.
The new findings describe a galactic battle between the galaxy on the right in the image above, which hosts an actively feeding , a quasar, at its center, and its neighbor on the left, which is being bombarded by intense radiation that disrupts its ability to form new .
.Named J012555.11−012925.00, the quasar is generally so bright that it outshines its surroundings, dominating optical images as a single point of light. However, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (), a network of 66 radio dishes in the Chilean Andes working together as one giant telescope, astronomers were able to distinguish the second galaxy.
The observations revealed the companion galaxy is moving toward the quasar-hosting galaxy at about 1.2 million miles per hour (2 million kilometers per hour), indicating the two are in the midst of a high-speed collision.
To study how the quasar's radiation affects the companion galaxy, the researchers used the X-shooter instrument on the (VLT), also located in Chile. By analyzing the quasar's light as it passed through the other galaxy, they found the radiation blasts apart the gas in the companion galaxy, leaving behind compact cloudlets that are too small to form new stars..
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"We see for the first time the effect of a quasar's radiation directly on the internal structure of the gas in an otherwise regular galaxy," Sergei Balashev, a researcher at the Ioffe Institute in Russia, who co-led the study, said in the statement.