Posts Tagged ‘the milky way’
For a time, suspected that the accumulation of material in the hot young stars is not gradual, but that happens in separate episodes, resulting in this short but powerful energy emission of these stars. However, in the models of star formation, this has been largely ignored. Now, a team of astrophysicists offers a new vision of star formation through the development of advanced computer models to simulate the behavior of the young stars.
While the stars are young, are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, and grow by absorbing material in these disks through the process of accretion. Discs can be fragmented, which leads to the formation of smaller stars, planets and brown dwarfs. The latter are objects more massive than planets, but not enough to become stars. Read the rest of this entry »
When two galaxies merge, giving rise to a giant, the central supermassive black hole of the new galaxy develops an insatiable appetite. However, this ferocious appetite is unsustainable. For the first time, observations from the Gemini Observatory clearly show an outflow galactic extreme, large scale, which leads to the cosmic dinner to an end.
In this flow, it is ejecting gas and dust that, if maintained in its original location, would have served to give the monstrous black hole gas and dust it needs to sustain its growth frenzy. This tremendous release of galactic dust and gas also limits the material available for the galaxy to form new generations of stars. Read the rest of this entry »
A thick stellar disk in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy has been identified for the first time. The discovery and the properties of this record will allow better defining the dominant physical processes involved in the formation and evolution of the large spiral galaxies like our own, the Milky Way.
By analyzing the precise measurements of the velocities of each of several bright stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, taken with the Keck telescope in Hawaii, the team of Michelle Collins (Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge) has managed to discern what thick disk stars form and what the thin disk, and evaluate how they differ both in size and chemical records. Read the rest of this entry »