Galaxies are available many sizes and styles. The Milky Way, for instance, is a spiral galaxy due to the way in which that stars, mud, and fuel spiral out from the middle of the galaxy.
However spiral galaxies like ours are surprisingly uncommon in our galactic neighborhood, and for years, astronomers have puzzled why for the reason that Nineteen Sixties.
Now, they might lastly have a solution, in line with a brand new examine revealed within the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy earlier this month.
A turbulent previous
Utilizing a supercomputer, researchers turned again the clock to roughly 13.8 billion years ago when our galaxy and people round it had been simply beginning to kind.
The researchers simulated the evolution of our galactic neighborhood to see what could have occurred over billions of years to make spiral galaxies so uncommon in our nook of the cosmos.
They discovered proof of a turbulent previous. The simulation confirmed that galaxies in dense clusters, just like the one our Milky Method calls dwelling, skilled frequent collisions and mergers.
When galaxies collide
When galaxies merge, they’ll kind a complete new sort of galaxy. For instance, when two spiral galaxies collide, it is thought to create what’s referred to as an elliptical galaxy.
That is what each observations of our close by universe and the simulations confirmed: Our galactic neighborhood has loads of elliptical galaxies however only a few spiral galaxies, suggesting that our Milky Method in some way survived amidst a chaotic situation of galactic bumper vehicles over the age of the universe.
“Our simulation reveals the intimate details of the formation of galaxies such as the transformation of spirals into ellipticals through galaxy mergers,” mentioned co-author Carlos Frenk with the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham College in a statement.
This text was initially revealed by Business Insider.
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