Astronomers have studied the carbon monoxide in a galaxy over 12 billion light years from Earth and discovered that it’s running out of gas, quite literally, and headed for a ‘red and dead’ future. The galaxy, known as ALESS65, was observed by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in 2011 and is one of less than 20 known distant galaxies to contain carbon monoxide. Dr Minh Huynh from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) led the team on their search for galactic carbon monoxide in work published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “We’re familiar with carbon monoxide here on Earth as the deadly gas that can cause suffocation, but in galaxies it plays an important role in the lifecycle of stars,” said Huynh. “Out of the galaxies that we know contain carbon monoxide, less than 20 are as far away from Earth as ALESS65. Out of the billions of galaxies out there, the detections are very rare!” Huynh, who grew up in Perth, said that at first astronomers didn’t think there could be massive ‘red and dead’ galaxies in the distant Universe, so studying galaxies heading The post Carbon monoxide predicts ‘red and dead’ future of gas guzzler galaxy has been published on Technology Org. Similar news or articles: MOND predicts dwarf galaxy feature prior to observations Entire galaxies feel the heat from newborn stars: Bursts of star birth can curtail future galaxy growth Bullying black holes force galaxies to stay red and dead #astronomy » see original post feedproxy.google/~r/TechnologyOrgSpaceAstronomyNews/~3/GcTSdzIWwqY/
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 09:25:23 +0000