‘Dead’ Galaxies Aren’t So Dead After All

By ScienceDaily

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110531155357.htm

Scientists have found that new stars are being made in galaxies that we thought were dead! In four different galaxies, each about 40 million light years away, and each light year approximately 5.9 trillion miles, new starts are being reborn!

"Scientists thought these were dead galaxies that had finished making stars a long time ago," U-M research fellow Alyson Ford said. "But we've shown that they are still alive and are forming stars at a fairly low level."

There are two types of galaxies, the spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies. Spiral galaxies, such as out Milky Way, have cold, dense gas, from which new stars are formed. However, stars in elliptical galaxies orbit around randomly and have almost no cold gas, and up until now to formations of stars were known. However, astronomers have found out a way to look at all the light from solar systems concentrating not only on the whole galaxy at once but on specific stars, using the Hubble Space Telescope. This telescope makes it possible for us to see stars being created, even at the rate of one per 100,000 years.

"We were confused by some of the colors of objects in our images until we realized that they must be star clusters, so most of the star formation happens in associations," Ford said.

A star we have observed is the star formation Messier 105, an elliptical galaxy 34 million light years ago. Ford and Bregman have discovered a single star 10 to 20 times larger than the mass of the sun. In Messier 10, new stars are being formed every 10,000 years. Our next mystery to solve is what the gas that forms stars actually is.

I thought that this article was really interesting, and it might be what future space research is going to be based on. I think that it’s incredible that “dead” galaxies just turn out to be alive, even if at a very slow rate. If it’s true that stars are created wherever there’s the cold, dense gas, then the universe might never end. Also, if humans managed to discover what this star- making gas was made up of, we might be able to discover exactly how stars are made. Then we could re- create the gas, and when our sun dies we could make another star just as close as the sun, to continue living and receiving light and heat. Also, if these galaxies really were dead, and then became alive, maybe this gas could serve as a good medicine for humans. (or maybe they were just unknown to humans) Another thing that fascinated me while reading this article was that stars can take up to 100,000 years to create, at least in Elliptical galaxies. It would take a long waiting to see the process, and a lot of gas.