The jellyfish galaxy JW39 hangs serenely on this picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble House Telescope. This galaxy lies over 900 million light-years away within the constellation Coma Berenices and is certainly one of a number of jellyfish galaxies Hubble has been learning over the previous two years.
Regardless of this jellyfish galaxy’s serene look, it’s adrift in a ferociously hostile surroundings: a galaxy cluster. In comparison with their extra remoted counterparts, the galaxies in galaxy clusters are sometimes distorted by the gravitational pull of bigger neighbors, which might twist galaxies into a wide range of shapes.
If that was not sufficient, the space between galaxies in a cluster can also be pervaded with a searingly sizzling plasma referred to as the intracluster medium. Whereas this plasma is extraordinarily tenuous, galaxies transferring via it expertise it nearly like swimmers preventing in opposition to a present, and this interplay can strip galaxies of their star-forming gasoline.
This interplay between the intracluster medium and the galaxies is known as ram-pressure stripping and is the method chargeable for the trailing tendrils of this jellyfish galaxy. As JW39 moved via the cluster, the stress of the intracluster medium stripped away gasoline and dust into lengthy trailing ribbons of star formation that now stretch away from the disk of the galaxy.
Astronomers utilizing Hubble’s Huge Discipline Digicam 3 studied these trailing tendrils intimately, as they’re a very excessive surroundings for star formation. Surprisingly, they discovered that star formation within the ‘tentacles’ of jellyfish galaxies was not noticeably completely different from star formation within the galaxy disk.
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Hubble captures jellyfish galaxy JW39 (2023, Might 30)
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