Why Are Galaxies So Smooth?

Why Are Galaxies So Smooth? (5/1/09)

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered streams of young stars flowing from their natal cocoons in distant galaxies. These distant rivers of stars provide an answer to one of astronomy's most fundamental puzzles: how do young stars that form clustered together in dense clouds of dust and gas disperse to form the large, smooth distribution seen in the disks of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way? ...

"When you look at the disks of galaxies in the infrared they are remarkably smooth. All of the older stars are evenly distributed. But stars aren't born that way; they're born in clusters and associations like the Pleiades cluster, or the association of young stars in the Orion constellation of our own Milky Way galaxy. So the question is - why are the disks of galaxies so smooth?" said team leader David Block of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

"Our analysis now answers the grand puzzle. By finding a myriad of streams of young stars all over the disks of galaxies we studied, we see that the mechanism for pulling the clusters of young stars apart is shearing motions of the parent galaxy. These streams are the 'missing link' we needed to understand how the disks of galaxies evolve to look the way they do," said Block.

NGC 2841 – click for 1750×940 image

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