ALMA Observatory in Chile: Trans-galactic Streamers Feeding Most Luminous Galaxy in the Universe
15 November, 2018
The most luminous galaxy in the universe has been caught in the act of stripping away nearly half the mass from not one, not two, but at least three of its smaller neighbors, according to new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations published in the journal Science. The light from this galaxy, known as W2246-0526, took 12.4 billion years to reach us, so we see it as it was when our universe was only a tenth of its present age.
The new observations with ALMA reveal distinct streamers of material being pulled from three smaller galaxies and flowing into the more massive galaxy, which was discovered in 2015 by NASA’s space-based Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). It is by no means the largest or most enormous galaxy we know of, but it is unrivaled in its brightness, emitting as much infrared light as 350 trillion Suns.
The connecting tendrils between the galaxies contain about as much material as the galaxies themselves. ALMA’s amazing resolution and sensitivity allowed the researchers to detect these remarkably faint and distant trans-galactic streamers.
“We knew from previous data that there were three companion galaxies, but there was no evidence of interactions between these neighbors and the central source,” said Tanio Diaz-Santos of the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, lead author of the study. “We weren’t looking for cannibalistic behavior and weren’t expecting it, but this deep dive with the ALMA observatory makes it very clear.”
More:
https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-release/trans-galactic-streamers-feeding-most-luminous-galaxy-in-the-universe/