Astronomers discovered an ultra-rare spiral galaxy with a ring of hydrogen swirling around its poles.
Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes, from giant, slowly rotating ovals and fast-whirling spiral disks to faint ball-shaped blobs and dwarf irregulars. Most large, bright galaxies — including our own Milky Way — are orbited by a gang of much smaller dwarf galaxies.
Using CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder radio telescope, on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia, we recently discovered an enormous ribbon of hydrogen encircling a spiral galaxy called NGC 4632. The results are described in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The location and movement of these polar rings can also tell us about the shape of the halo of invisible dark matter astronomers believe surrounds most galaxies. Some warps may be caused by a galaxy wrestling with its neighbors via gravity, stealing gas which collects in the galaxy's outer disk or forms a polar ring. This is quite a common process by which galaxies grow: our Milky Way galaxy is known to have munched up several small companions.
ASKAP began full operations in late 2022. The telescope is located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO’s Murchison radio astronomy observatory: the traditional name means ‘sharing sky and stars’ in the Wajarri language.
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