03:47 PM Thursday, January 11, 2024
This massive blob called J0613+52, about 270 million light-years away, appears to contain no stars at all. At least, nothing to be seen. It’s just a fog made of the kind of interstellar gas found in normal galaxies, drifting along on its own like a completely hideous person.
According to a team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Karen O’Neill of Green Bank Observatory, this may be the first discovery of a primordial galaxy in the nearby universe, a galaxy composed mostly of gas that formed at the beginning of time.
The discovery – made purely by chance – was presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, according to the Science Alert website.
“It’s a galaxy made only of gas, and it has no visible stars,” O’Neill says. “The stars could be there, but we can’t see them.”
The researchers were using Green Bank Observatory to study what are known as low surface brightness galaxies. Most of these galaxies are small dwarfs that do not emit much light, because most of their content consists of gas and dark matter. Compared to other galaxies, it contains very few stars.
The researchers were looking to measure the gas content and mass of galaxies, so the survey focused on looking for gas, rather than stars, using the Green Bank Telescope, the Arecibo Telescope, and the Nankai Radio Telescope.
In the Green Bank Radio data, there was no sign of stars at all. The object appears to be isolated and undisturbed, having not experienced any gravitational interactions over 13.8 billion years that would have disrupted the gas, either tearing it apart, or pushing it into the masses needed to significantly stimulate star formation. This makes J0613+52 an object unlike any other we’ve seen before.
“What we do know is that it is an incredibly gas-rich galaxy,” says Karen O’Neill. “It doesn’t show star formation as we would expect, perhaps because its gas is too diffuse. At the same time, it is too far away from other galaxies to help stimulate star formation.” “This may be the first discovery of a nearby galaxy composed of primordial gas.”
Given the way matter in the universe appears to be clumped together, J0613+52 may be unique, at least in near space — a cloud of gas unchanged since the dawn of the universe, drifting on its own for billions of years.
