A shockwave traveling through Stephan's Quintet at over a million miles per hour is causing turbulence in between its five galaxies.
"As the shockwave passes through this clumpy streamer, it is creating a highly turbulent, or unsteady, cooling layer, and it's in the regions affected by this violent activity that we're seeing unexpected structures and the recycling of molecular hydrogen gas," Appleton said.
But Stephan's Quintet differs from other sites of galactic collisions because these mergers usually trigger bouts of intense star formation, which isn't occurring in these five galaxies. Instead, in Stephan's Quintet the turbulence of these galactic collisions are being felt in the intergalactic medium, where there is not enough raw material to trigger star birth.
"The power of ALMA is obvious in these observations, providing astronomers new insights and better understanding of these previously unknown processes," Joe Pesce, ALMA program officer at the U.S. National Science Foundation, said in the same statement.At the heart of the main shockwave, a region designated Field 6, a giant cloud of cold molecules is being broken down and reshaped into a tail of warm molecular hydrogen.
This hydrogen"recycling plant" isn't the only strange phenomenon these shockwaves are triggering. In a region called Field 5, the team spotted two cold clouds of gas linked by a stream of warm molecular hydrogen gas. One of the clouds has a bullet-like shape and is punching through this filament, giving rise to a ring-like structure.
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