Beautiful to look at is the galaxy NGC 7727, which is about 90 million light-years away from our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The fine, luminous web around its bright core has earned it the name “cotton candy galaxy.”
But behind the beautiful view lies chaos. The Cotton Candy Galaxy is the result of a gigantic cosmic collision: About a billion years ago, a classical spiral galaxy, located approximately at the location of NGC 7727, collided with another galaxy. The merger of the two galaxies is not yet complete and has distorted the well-ordered spiral arms into a tangled tangle.
The outer edges consist of interstellar dust and gas. Shining within are the cores of the two galaxies that are still merging. Like almost every galaxy, there is a supermassive black hole at their centers. One is 154 million times as massive as our Sun, the other has a mass of about 6.3 million solar masses. By comparison, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is only about as massive as 4.3 million suns.
Before the collision, the two black holes were each alone at the heart of the progenitor galaxies. Now they’ve gotten close, at least on a cosmic scale: Just 1,600 light-years separate the two gravitational monsters—no other pair of supermassive black holes has ever been found so close together. It is also the closest pair of supermassive black holes discovered to date.
The two black holes are on a collision course. In about 250 million years, they will likely collide and form an even more massive black hole. Even though this structure will be incredibly massive, it does not yet belong to the class of real heavyweights: the monster, located approximately in the center of the gigantic galaxy Messier 87 (M87 or NGC 4486), has a mass of 6, 5 billion suns is equivalent. The heaviest known supermassive black hole has a mass of about 66 billion solar masses.
If we talk about a collision between the two progenitor galaxies, this can obviously give rise to wrong ideas. The distances between the stars in the galaxies are enormous – so enormous that celestial bodies such as suns or planets only actually collide with each other due to extreme coincidence. It looks more like two clouds merging together. The gravitational forces were still working then, causing stars and nebulae to be thrown away and then pulled closer to the center by the gravity of the black holes.
The collision of gas clouds also has an effect that can also be observed in parts of the cotton candy galaxy: regions are created in which new stars are formed. In the Cotton Candy Galaxy, astronomers have found 23 places where the rate of star formation is so high that globular clusters are likely to form there. These are enormous collections of up to hundreds of thousands of stars, the densest gravitationally bound galaxies in the world. room.
However, this phase will also end. Sometime in the distant future, the Cotton Candy Galaxy will have transformed into an elliptical galaxy, which will then consist mainly of older stars and in which hardly any new stars will form.
The collision of two galaxies is also interesting because our Milky Way suffers a similar fate. Our home galaxy and its neighboring galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), are currently moving towards each other at a speed of about 110 kilometers per second and will inevitably collide. Currently, the two star systems are still about 2.5 million light-years apart – almost four billion years will pass before the two spiral galaxies come close for the first time. That’s almost as long as the Earth has existed so far.
When the outer regions of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way meet, they do so at an estimated speed of 1,000 kilometers per second. The two nuclei are still about 50,000 light years apart. So it will take another 16 million years before they meet. However, they will probably just approach each other at first, narrowly miss each other, and move away from each other briefly until gravity finally welds them together.
The result of this cosmic dance, in which the two spiral galaxies lose their shape and become elongated, will then, as in the case of the Cotton Candy Galaxy, be a gigantic elliptical galaxy that has no spiral arms. Elliptical galaxies are quite rare; they are among the oldest star populations in space and consist largely of old stars.
The Andromeda Galaxy, which now appears as a small, cigar-shaped patch of light, will dominate our night sky even before the collision. However, it will take about 3.75 billion years for that to happen. Who knows if there are still eyes that will be amazed by this spectacle…
Source: Blick
I am Ross William, a passionate and experienced news writer with more than four years of experience in the writing industry. I have been working as an author for 24 Instant News Reporters covering the Trending section. With a keen eye for detail, I am able to find stories that capture people’s interest and help them stay informed.
