A Surprising Ring 10 Billion Light Years Away: Galaxy PJ0116-24 | ESO
Previous studies suggested that such extreme galaxies must result from galactic mergers. These galactic collisions are thought to create dense gas regions where rapid star formation is triggered. However, isolated galaxies can also become HyLIRGs via internal processes alone, if star-forming gas is rapidly funneled towards the galaxy’s center.
In a new paper led by Daizhong Liu of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) were combined to study the motion of gas within PJ0116-24. ALMA traces cold gas, seen here in blue, whereas the VLT, with its new Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS), traces warm gas, shown in red. Thanks to these detailed observations, the team discovered that the gas in this extreme galaxy was rotating in an organized way, rather than in the chaotic way expected after a galactic collision––a surprising result! This shows convincingly that mergers are not always needed for a galaxy to become a HyLIRG.
PJ0116-24 is so far away that its light took about 10 billion years to reach us. Luckily, a foreground galaxy (not shown here) acted as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying the light of PJ0116-24 behind it into the Einstein ring seen here. This precise cosmic alignment allows astronomers to zoom in on very distant objects and see them in a level of detail that would otherwise be very hard to achieve.
Learn more:
https://www.mpe.mpg.de/8025063/news20240715
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/ESO/D. Liu et al.
Release Date: July 15, 2024
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