Russian scientists from Moscow State University, together with foreign colleagues from the USA, France, the United Arab Emirates and Japan, determined the mechanism of the occurrence of dark ultra-infusion galaxies – galaxies in which very few apparent stars. Briefly on the results of the study, revealing the secret of these objects and published in the Nature Astronomy journal, describes the press release on the RHF website.
It was assumed that galaxies with extremely low luminosity appear when the intergalactic medium literally blows out the interstellar gas from the galaxy, stopping the processes of star formation. The intergalactic medium consists of a hot plasma with a temperature of up to tens of millions of degrees. Although this plasma is very resolved, on the scale of the galaxy, it has sufficient density to interact with the substance.
Astronomers studied 11 young galaxies of a small mass in clusters of Veronica’s hair (323 million light years from the Earth) and Abel (486 million light years from the Earth). These galaxies are similar to ultra-dipped galaxies, but still quite bright thanks to young age. It turned out that they have tails from rarefied gas and recently formed stars. These processes appeared due to the effects of the intergalactic medium, which squeezes their substance. It is estimated that they will all become ultra-dipped for the next ten billion years.
Since the galaxies lose weight, the average distance from the center to stars increases. It is this expansion that makes them ultra-dipped. For many galaxies, this process ended 180-970 million years ago, and thus emerged at least 44 percent of ultra-dipped galaxies.