A sea of mystery:

⁣This spiral galaxy, found 220 million light-years from Earth (and seen here by @NASAHubble), is known as a "jellyfish" galaxy because of the blue ribbons of stars that trail from it like cosmic tentacles. When viewed in X-ray light, though, an even longer tail of hot gas emerges which extends across 260,000 light-years of space—shown here in purplish-blue with data from @NASAChandraXRay.⁣

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The newly-forming stars in the tail are a mystery to astronomers. Galaxies that live in a cluster tend to stop forming new stars sooner than galaxies outside of clusters. The “jellyfish” galaxy in the cluster is getting pulled in by the cluster’s gravity which causes the gas to act like wind and can remove the gas and dust in a process called “ram pressure stripping”. ⁣

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Since galaxies need gas to form stars, this will then slow the process of star formation. Astronomers hope to learn how the stripping process changed over time and how that affected conditions to form new stars.⁣

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Image description: A bright blue light, encircled by translucent blue swirls, rockets toward the upper left of the image, leaving two long blue ribbons of young stars dangling from the galaxy’s disk like cosmic tentacles. Set against a black background of space packed with gleaming stars, clusters of blue gas and stars appear to travel with the galaxy alongside the flowing tails. In this image, X-ray light is represented by blue in the tail of hot gas streaming behind the galaxy. In visible light, you can see the blue tendrils like “jellyfish tentacles”. ⁣

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Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC⁣

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#NASA #Space #Galaxy #Stars #Gas #Jellyfish #SpiralGalaxy 

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09 November 2023