The mystery of a galaxy's missing gas has been solved: researchers have found a nearby galaxy going so fast its gas is trailing behind it.
Researchers have been confused about the galaxy NGC 4569 since they discovered it. Why did it contain less gas than they expected? Well, they finally got their answer: the galaxy is being trailed by a tail of a gas more than 300,000 light-years across, which is five times longer than the galaxy itself.
According to Daily Mail, NGC 4569 sits in the Virgo cluster, traveling through it at around 1,200 kilometers per second. Because of its speed, the galaxy’s gas is being stripped from it, forming a tail behind it.
“What’s very nice is that if you measure the mass of the stream, it’s the same amount of gas that’s missing from the galaxy’s disc,” said Luca Cortese, one of the researchers observing the galaxy.
This news comes out of study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and it posits that NGC4569 could be the first of many galaxies with long tails of gas extending behind them.
“We know that big clusters of galaxies trap a lot of hot gas,” said Cortese. “So when a galaxy enters the cluster it feels the pressure of all the gas, like when you feel the wind on your face, and that pressure is able to strip matter away from the galaxy.”
The researcher’s findings are highly exciting — both in terms of its unprecedented discovery and the fact that they finally know where all of the galaxy’s gas went.
“We didn’t have the smoking gun, the clear evidence of direst removal of gas from the galaxy,” said Cortese.
Thankfully for us and them, now they do.
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