Nasa telescope catches sight of mysterious 'jellyfish' galaxy

Wednesday, 24 April 2019

A mysterious galactic 'jellyfish' has been spotted swimming about space through Nasa's new telescope.

On its website, Nasa said the galaxy, known as ESO 137-001, appears to look like a 'jellyfish' because of its blue ribbons of young stars that 'dangle from the galaxy's disk like cosmic tentacles'.

The galaxy recently 'swam' into view of Nasa's new James Webb Space Telescope, which will be officially launched in 2021.

ESO 137-001 is a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Its tail extends across 260,000 light-years of space, almost three times the galaxy's width, Nasa's website states.

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'If you look at the galaxy in x-ray light, however, you will find a giant tail of hot gas streaming behind the galaxy.'

Within the gaseous tail, young stars are forming and that's a mystery that's puzzling scientists.

'The newly forming stars in the tail are mysterious because processes common in large groups of galaxies should make it difficult for new stars to emerge,' the website states.

The space around the galaxies is filled with hot, tenuous gas. However, strong wind can remove gas and dust from a galaxy in a process known as 'ram pressure stripping'.

Galaxies need gas to form stars, and that stripping process can slow stars from forming. 'Eventually, all galaxies run out of gas and star formation stops.'

In a statement Stacey Alberts of the University of Arizona said 'both gas and dust are getting stripped off, but how much and what happens to the stripped material and the galaxy itself are still open questions'.

'We think it's hard to strip off a molecular cloud that's already forming stars because it should be tightly bound to the galaxy by gravity. Which means either we're wrong, or this gas got stripped off and heated up, but then had to cool again so that it could condense and form stars,' she said.

'Telling these two scenarios apart is one of the things we want to get at.'

After it's launched in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope will study the galaxy to learn how the gas is being removed, and why stars are forming within its gaseous tail.

Webb is an international project run by Nasa, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency.