A stream of hydrogen gas has been find link up two galaxies 2.6 million light years asunder . The premature record book for this sort of bridge was1.6 million , in theVirgo Cluster , the closest astronomic cluster to ourselves .
In this case the beetleweed are 500 million lightsome years away , making faint-hearted elements much harder to see than at the 65Mly distance of Virgo . catching was conducted with the giantWilliam E Gordon Telescope at Arecibo , Puerto Rico .
" This was wholly unexpected . We frequently see petrol streams in galaxy clusters , where there are mountain of galaxies close together , but to find something this long and not in a clump is unprecedented , ” suppose Dr Rhys Taylor of the Czech Academy of Sciences and lead generator of a paper inMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .
Given the brain - warping plate of such an object , it is perhaps best to note that our own galax is usually deal 100,000 lightsome year in duration , although component stars have been found900,000ly from Earth .
Roberto Rodriguez of the University of Puerto Rico tell , " We commonly regain gas inside galaxies , but here one-half of the petrol – 15 billion time the mass of the Sun – is in the bridge . That ’s far more than in the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies aggregate ! " Rodriguez was one of three undergraduate students who are author of the newspaper .
Although the author observe " H I … is less gravitationally bound to the coltsfoot and therefore easier to remove " the formation of such a immense bridge poses a puzzle . Taylor ’s team are exploring the possible action that either the bombastic extragalactic nebula anchoring one death of the current communicate by the radical of beetleweed at the other drawing throttle with it , or that the declamatory galaxy passed through the midsection of the mathematical group and press gas in front of it . The latter might be expected to leave alone a more disturbed galactic group behind , but would explicate the gas hold out from the bombastic galaxy off from the chemical group .
Either way the co-occurrence of the almost equally telling watercourse of gas come from another nearby galaxy towards the grouping also needs explaining .
The bridge is formed from atomic hydrogen ( H I ) , rather than molecular hydrogen ( H2 ) . The paper mention , “ The coltsfoot density is extremely high ( 15 deg-2 ) and many ( ~24 % ) show preindication of H I emission . ” galaxy in obtusely live areas are often depleted in H I , presumably because it has been draw out into streams such as this . It is think that this is also the ground such galaxies show signs of reduced lead formation , having lost much of the accelerator pedal that would otherwise provide fuel for star , and Taylor ’s squad go for to habituate this extreme case as a study example .
