A team of researchers from the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center of the California Institute of Technology (IPAC) has announced the detection of a new type of spiral galaxies, similar to the Milky Way, but much larger.
Those responsible for the discovery point out that the presence of these distant objects has gone unnoticed until now because experts had mistaken them for spiral galaxies with more conventional characteristics .
According to astrophysicist Patrick Ogle, who has coordinated this study, published in the Astrophysical Journal , the finding could be compared to that of an animal the size of an elephant that had been around us for a long time, but that, surprisingly, we had not glimpsed.
“These superspirals are as luminous and massive as the largest and brightest galaxies known, ” says Ogle. This scientist and his collaborators became aware of its existence while reviewing the database that NASA and IPAC have on very massive galaxies, which includes information provided by different observatories of more than one hundred million of these objects.
After a careful analysis of a sample of 800,000 galaxies , they managed to find 53 of these supercoils. Thus, they found out that they are very far away. The closest is more than 1.2 billion light years away. Also, they emit between eight and fourteen times more brightness than the Milky Way, are at least ten times more massive and are four times larger – they extend about 440,000 light years, compared to 100,000 in our cosmic neighborhood – and multiply by thirty the rate of star formation in spiral galaxies like ours.
Some of these aspects collide with what astronomers have been maintaining so far about the formation of spiral galaxies , so it will be necessary to carry out more studies on their origin. Of course, in four of them, Ogle’s team has observed that they have two galactic nuclei, which suggests that it has been possible to have a fusion between two of them.
Image: SD SS
