• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Milky Way Is An Absolute Weirdo Among Its Peers

November 29, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

If you thought that the Milky Way was just your average run-of-the-mill galaxy, you’d be wrong. Turns out that it’s quite the freak and we shouldn’t consider it a standard example of how spiral galaxies evolve. Multiple results suggest that something unusual is afoot when it comes to the Milky Way’s satellites, the smaller galaxies that orbit our own.

The Satellites Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) Survey has looked at 101 spiral galaxies similar to the Milky Way and 378 satellite galaxies around those 101. Finding these smaller galaxies is difficult as they are very faint, but the potential reward was high. It provided insights into the dark matter halo of these galaxies, the spherical distribution of dark matter believed to be the birthplace of all of these objects.

Advertisement

“There’s a reason no one ever tried this before,” Professor Risa Wechsler, from Stanford University, said in a statement. “It’s a really ambitious project. We had to use clever techniques to sort those 378 orbiting galaxies from thousands of objects in the background. It’s a real needle-in-the-haystack problem.”

The Milky Way has four observable satellites consistent with the limit of the survey. Two of these satellites are actually visible to the naked eye in the southern hemisphere: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC), although they might be three for the price of two.

One aspect of the research showed that the 101 spiral galaxies in the survey have between 13 and zero satellites, so the Milky Way is in the correct range, but when galaxies with large satellites like the LMC and the SMC are considered, our own galaxy is actually found lacking.

three examples show a galaxie in the middle and a large circle around it. Within the circle the team identified satellites: two, six, and nine satellite galaxies, respectively.

Three examples of SAGA galaxies and their satellites.

Image credit: Yasmeen Asali (Yale), with images from the DESI Legacy Surveys Sky Viewer.

If this was not enough, a second study found that, typically, star formation is occurring in all satellite galaxies in the SAGA survey. But this is not the case for the Milky Way; only the LMC and the SMC are forming stars and this might be due to the interaction these two/three galaxies have with each other.

Advertisement

“Now we have a puzzle,” Wechsler said. “What in the Milky Way caused these small, lower-mass satellites to have their star formation quenched? Perhaps, unlike a typical host galaxy, the Milky Way has a unique combination of older satellites that have ceased star formation and newer, active ones—the LMC and SMC—that only recently fell into the Milky Way’s dark matter halo.”

Satellite galaxies closer to the large ones also tend to have less star formation. The work shows that there is a lot more to know about dark matter halos and how they shape the evolution of galaxies.

“Our results show that we cannot constrain models of galaxy formation just to the Milky Way,” said Wechsler, who is also a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “We have to look at that full distribution of similar galaxies across the universe.”

The studies are published in The Astrophysical Journal and can be found here and here.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Lacking Company, A Dolphin In The Baltic Is Talking To Himself

Source Link: The Milky Way Is An Absolute Weirdo Among Its Peers

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • “Carter Catastrophe”: The Math Equation That Predicts The End Of Humanity
  • Why Is There No Nobel Prize For Mathematics?
  • These Are The Only Animals Known To Incubate Eggs In Their Stomachs And Give “Birth” Out Their Mouths
  • Constipated? This One Fruit Could Help, Says First-Ever Evidence-Led Diet Guidance
  • NGC 2775: This Galaxy Breaks The Rules Of “Galactic Evolution” And Baffles Astronomers
  • Meet The “Four-Eyed” Hirola, The World’s Most Endangered Antelope With Fewer Than 500 Left
  • The Bizarre 1997 Experiment That Made A Frog Levitate
  • There’s A Very Good Reason Why October 1582 On Your Phone Is Missing 10 Days
  • Skynet-1A: Military Spacecraft Launched 56 Years Ago Has Been Moved By Persons Unknown
  • There’s A Simple Solution To Helping Avoid Erectile Dysfunction (But You’re Not Going To Like It)
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS May Be 10 Billion Years Old, This Rare Spider Is Half-Female, Half-Male Split Down The Middle, And Much More This Week
  • Why Do Trains Not Have Seatbelts? It’s Probably Not What You Think
  • World’s Driest Hot Desert Just Burst Into A Rare And Fleeting Desert Bloom
  • Theoretical Dark Matter Infernos Could Melt The Earth’s Core, Turning It Liquid
  • North America’s Largest Mammal Once Numbered 60 Million – Then Humans Nearly Drove It To Extinction
  • North America’s Largest Ever Land Animal Was A 21-Meter-Long Titan
  • A Two-Headed Fossil, 50/50 Spider, And World-First Butt Drag
  • Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Is Losing Buckets Of Water Every Second – And It’s Got Cyanide
  • “A Historic Shift”: Renewables Generated More Power Than Coal Globally For First Time
  • The World’s Oldest Known Snake In Captivity Became A Mom At 62 – No Dad Required
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version