Burn bright; die young.
Scientists are left scratching their heads after a hugely productive galaxy went dark without warning, according to a new study.
The monstrous star system, known as XMM-2599, reportedly existed 12 billion years ago when the universe was a ripe young 1.8 billion years old, reports SciTech Daily. But researchers at the University Of California in Riverside are bewildered over how the “ultramassive galaxy” could suddenly die.
The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Despite its comparatively short life span, the star system was immensely productive and churned out “a mass of more than 300 billion suns” before it was 2 billion years old, according to the study’s lead author, Ben Forrest. To put it in perspective, our own Milky Way produces about one star a year.
However, like many rising stars, XMM-2599 suddenly and inexplicably “perished.” Gillian Wilson of the UC Riverside department of physics and astronomy says the intergalactic blackout was particularly perplexing because “very few galaxies have stopped forming stars, and none are as massive as XMM-2599.”
Researchers haven’t determined the cause of XMM-2599’s death, although Wilson speculates that “it stopped getting fuel, or its black hole began to turn on.”
However, the galaxy may have a future, according to Wilson, who speculates that it could turn into something else, or even “gravitationally attract nearby star-forming galaxies and become a bright city of galaxies.”
The team hopes to continue using the Keck Observatory’s advanced imagery to paint a better picture of XMM-2599’s life. “We used Keck to better characterize and confirm its nature and help us understand how monster galaxies form and die,” says study co-author Marianna Annunziatella, a postdoctoral researcher at Tufts University.
This isn’t the first interstellar anomaly to go viral recently. In November, the internet was left starstruck after NASA posted a photo of galaxies seeming to fight each other.
Ref;nypost.com