Chilean telescope finds 52 galaxies with huge reserves of cold gas

Astronomers from an international team led by Chilean researcher Victoria Catan have found 52 previously invisible galaxies with colossal reserves of cold gas. It's from sb.by.

According to RIA Novosti, earlier scientists were primarily looking for galaxies that glow brightly in the optical and infrared ranges: such systems are characterized by rapid star birth. Because of this, galaxies with weak stellar activity went unnoticed. Katan’s team took a different path: instead of looking for light, it focused on cold gas, the main building block for stars.

The ALMA telescope was used in the Atacama Desert. The researchers tracked the signals of monoxide and atomic carbon – they indicate the presence of gas clouds. In addition, the scientists analyzed spectral data in detail, which were often not taken into account before. This led to the discovery of objects inaccessible to other instruments, including galaxies at the stage of transition to an inactive state.

The analysis showed that the volume of gas in the found galaxies can reach a trillion times the mass of the Sun - this suggests a serious potential for star formation. At the same time in a number of systems star formation is almost not. The researchers suggest that the reason is that the new stars heat the gas: because of this, it can not shrink and generate the next generation of stars.

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