March 8, 2020
By: Haris Ahmad[1]
As I explained in my first blog on this same topic, our universe is overwhelmingly huge. It extends over billions of light-years across. As we know, the larger something is, the easier it is to find extreme objects within. I have discussed many strange celestial bodies in my previous blogs but, in those blogs didn’t include galaxies. Hence, in this blog too I will cover some more strange galaxies we have discovered.
The first galaxy I’ll talk about is NGC 6946 which is also known as the Fireworks galaxy. This galaxy is also a cannibal galaxy just as Andromeda galaxy which will collide with our Milky way in just a few billion years.
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| Image Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/fireworks-galaxy-ngc6946.html |
NGC 6946 is eating up the mass of three of its companion galaxies and has already done eating half of their mass. It is called the fireworks galaxy due to huge number of supernovae (celestial bodies that are formed due to the explosion of a star when it runs out of fuel) in it.
The galaxy I’ll talk about has a huge name; WISE J224607.57-052635.0. It is located in the Aquarius Constellation is a very bright galaxy that shines more than 300 trillion suns combined.
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| Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_J224607.57%E2%88%92052635.0 |
Probably, there is a supermassive black hole at the center of this galaxy which has formed an accretion disk around it due to the gas, dust and space debris. These accretion disks are super-accelerated churning masses of particles that are among the brightest objects in the whole universe. The temperature of these disks reaches up to millions of degrees and emits Ultra-violet as well as X-rays due to which the clouds of dust around the black hole heat up. These clouds then radiate, making their parent galaxy insanely bright.
Another strange galaxy that I’ll explain about is Messier 63 which is located 57 million light-years from us in the Canes Venatici Constellation.
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| Image Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/messier-63-the-sunflower-galaxy |
This galaxy looks like a sunflower as it consists of a central disk which is surrounded by small sleeves that contain blue and white stars. The strange thing about this galaxy is that it has a strange ability to change its color. The core remains bright yellow and its sleeves change colors to blue, brown, white and purple.
The last galaxy I’ll talk about is Messier 94 which is a spiral galaxy located in the Canes Venatici constellation, the same as the previous galaxy I talked about.
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| Image Source: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17011 |
When you look at this galaxy, it seems as if it’s a huge hurricane. You will get this perception because of the bright blue sleeves of rapidly forming stars that surround the galaxy. These stars are rapidly forming due to the pressure from the center of the galaxy which forces the gases to move to the sleeves of the galaxy forming gas clouds and then stars because these gases have star-forming material packed in them such as Hydrogen and Helium.
In this blog which was the second of its topic, I explained some more strange galaxies that exist in our galaxies. There are many other galaxies that may be strange but I only highlighted the ones which seemed strange to me.
[1] Haris Ahmad is currently studying in 9th grade (O levels) in The City School Islamabad.
Nice articles. You could gather information about galaxies that do not have SMBH-holes in their centres, if such galaxies do exist.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback sir, I'll try to find galaxies like that and will try to write another blog in the series about them.
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