14 DAY TRIAL // As it turns out, a cosmic wake might soon be in order for a galaxy that sits billions of light-years away from our good old planet. Or so astronomers writing in yesterday's issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society say.
The galaxy in question is known to the scientific community as ALESS65, and previous investigations have shown it to be located at a distance of about 12 billion light-years from Earth.
According to Dr. Minh Huynh with the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, this galaxy is well on its way to running out of gas, and is, therefore, heading towards what astronomers like to call a red and dead future.
What Dr. Minh Huynh and fellow researchers mean to say is that, since gas is the fuel that galaxies need in order to birth new stars, the fact that ALESS65 is in the process of losing all its gas will cause it to soon lose its status as a stellar nursery.
Mind you, this “very soon” that the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research specialist and her colleagues keep referring to is nothing like the “very soon” we, mere mortals, use to mark the passing of time here on Earth.
Quite the contrary, “very soon” in the case of this distant galaxy need be understood as “in several dozen million years from now,” the scientists explain in their paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has about five billion years before it runs out of fuel and becomes ‘red and dead,’ but ALESS65 is a gas guzzler and only has 10s of millions of years left – very fast in astronomical terms,” Dr. Minh Huynh details.
It is believed that this distant galaxy is heading towards completely running out of gas at a fairly pace due to the fact that, when compared to other galaxies, its star-forming regions are significantly larger and, therefore, likely use up more fuel.
As Dr. Minh Huynh puts it, “We were able to work out the strength of the UV radiation in ALESS65; it’s similar to some ‘starbursting’ galaxies in the local universe, but the stars in ALESS65 are forming in much larger areas when compared to local galaxies.”
The astronomers base their claims that ALESS65 is well on its way to a red and dead future on information obtained while studying the galaxy's carbon monoxide content with the help of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and the Australia Telescope Compact Array radio telescope.
This investigation confirms that ALESS65 is one of the less than 20 distant galaxies thus far documented to accommodate for this chemical compound which is known to greatly influence the formation and development of stars. The finding should lead to a better understanding of the universe.
“Finding and studying carbon monoxide in more galaxies will tell us even more about how stars formed in the early days of the Universe and help solve the mystery of far away ‘red and dead’ galaxies,” Dr. Minh Huynh says.