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Israeli study sheds light on life of galaxies
Study published in Science magazine and headed by Israeli professor reveals new discoveries about how galaxies are born and die.
A new Israeli study has shed light on how galaxies die and is being printed in one of the world's most prestigious publications.
An article in this week's Science magazine contains astronomer's reports about observational studies that illuminate the way in which galaxies die. The team of researches included astronomers from Switzerland and Germany, as well as the cosmology team from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem headed by Professor Avishai Dekel.
Galaxy NGC 1300 in a photo taken by the Hubble telescope (Photo: NASA)
A combination of space-based observation, giant telescopes, and advanced computer simulations has helped researchers understand how galaxies form. This is an important milestone in understanding the cosmic process begun by the Big Bang and that resulted in the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets.
The new discoveries corroborate the theoretical understanding developed by Professor Dekel and his colleagues based on computer simulations. According to the model, every galaxy undergoes a dramatic contraction that ultimately causes star formation to be halted.
There are several different causes for this contraction, such as collisions between galaxies. Hydrogen gas, the main component of galaxies in the early universe, heats up after such an event, becomes extremely dense, loses energy and collapses into the contracted center of the galaxy. This dense gas is a catalyst for the quick formation of stars, but this burst of star formation ultimately makes it impossible for new stars to form.
The discoveries reported in Science were based partly on observations at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. These observations identified for the first time galaxies undergoing the process in which the formation of stars stops in the center of the galaxy, while stars are still being formed at its periphery.
