Shockwaves resulting from the violent collision between an intruder galaxy and Stephan's Quintet are helping astronomers to understand how turbulence influences gas in the intergalactic medium.
New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed that a sonic boom several times the size of the Milky Way has kickstarted a recycling plant for warm and cold
That clean window into the universe has allowed astronomers to watch what's happening as one of the galaxies, NGC 7318b, violently intrudes into the group at a relative speed of roughly 800 km/second. At that speed, a trip from Earth to the moon would take just eight minutes. The new observations using ALMA's Band 6 receiver—developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory —allowed scientists to zoom into three key regions in extreme detail, and for the first time, build a clear picture of how the hydrogen gas is moving and being shaped on a continuous basis.
The region at the center of the main shock wave, dubbed Field 6, revealed a giant cloud of cold molecules that is being broken apart and stretched out into a long tail of warm molecular hydrogen and repeatedly recycled through these same phases."What we're seeing is the disintegration of a giant cloud of cold molecules in super-hot gas, and interestingly, the gas doesn't survive the shock, it just cycles through warm and cold phases," said Appleton.
Perhaps the most"normal" of the bunch is the region dubbed Field 4, where scientists found a steadier, less turbulent environment that allowed hydrogen gas to collapse into a disk of stars and what scientists believe is a small dwarf galaxy in formation.
Prior to the ALMA observations, scientists had little idea all of this was playing out in the Quintet's, but it wasn't for lack of trying. In 2010, the team used the Spitzer Space Telescope to observe Stephan's Quintet and discovered large clouds of warm—estimated to be between 100° to 400° Kelvin, or roughly -280° to 260° Fahrenheit—molecular hydrogen mixed in with the super-hot gas.
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