About 50 to 60 million light years away from Earth, mysterious stellar explosions occur in a galaxy named NGC 4383. The gas outflow from these cosmic blasts has 50 million times more mass than our Sun.
In a recently published study, researchers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) revealed a high-resolution map of the explosions in NGC 4383.
They suggest that stars in the central part of the galaxy are exploding, causing the formation of massive clouds of gases and the release of heavy chemical elements in large amounts.
Apart from hydrogen, “The outflow is distributing into space many heavy elements, such as sulfur, nitrogen, and oxygen. These are the building blocks for planets like Earth, and for life, as we know it,” Adam Watts, lead study author and a research associate at ICRAR, told IE.
Why do stars in NGC 4383 are dying?
Located in the Virgo cluster, NGC 4383 is one of the nearest galaxy clusters to the Milky Way. The map gives the researchers a unique opportunity to study gas outflow in a nearby galaxy.
Gases erupt from NGC 4383 at a speed of about 447,000 mph (200 km/s). This gas outflow is so massive that it would take one 20,000 years to travel to the end of the gaseous cloud even if they were to fly a rocket at the speed of light.
“Finding outflows like this one are very rare, so every time we find a new one we get a wealth of new information that we can use to understand the physics of what is happening,” Watts said.
According to the researchers, these kinds of outflows occur when a galaxy forms lots of new stars very fast, and this is what has happened at the center of this NGC 4383. Shortly after they are formed, the largest stars explode luminously, forming supernovae.
Such explosions sweep up gas from inside the galaxy and carry it away, leading to the outflow. “The ejected gas is quite rich in heavy elements giving us a unique view of the complex process of mixing between hydrogen and metals in the outflowing gas,” Watts noted.
Moreover, since this gas is the raw fuel for forming new stars, its removal by the outflow slows down the star formation process. This makes gas outflow an important factor in deciding the speed and periods for which a galaxy can continue to form stars.
NGC 4383 is just the first of many
NGC 4383 is one of the few galaxies where researchers have been able to measure the chemical elements in the outflow. “This is very useful to inform our models about how outflows mix up the gas they are carrying out of the galaxy,” Watts said.
Outflows are made of gas with different temperatures, and each one has its advantages and disadvantages,
For instance, in this study, Watts and his team looked at the “hot” gas, suitable for looking for chemical elements in the outflow, but measuring the gas mass is more uncertain. In the future, they will study the “cold” gas, which gives a more accurate gas mass.
The high-resolution map that reveals this information is produced using data from MAUVE, a UV satellite that studies stars in Virgo and other constellations.
However, the researchers are not going to stop with this particular map. They plan to use a similar approach to study stellar explosions in other galaxies in detail.
“We have much more data incoming that will let us study the physics of star formation within galaxies in great detail, including outflows and the pollution (release of heavy elements) of space,” Watts told IE.
The study is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
