Hubble captures a drifting galaxy

May 26. (EUROPE PRESS) –

The jellyfish galaxy JW39, more than 900 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, hangs serenely in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Despite its appearance, this galaxy is adrift in a fiercely hostile environment: a galaxy cluster. Compared to their more isolated counterparts, galaxies in galaxy clusters are often distorted by the gravitational pull of larger neighbors, they can twist galaxies into a variety of shapes.

If that wasn’t enough, the space between the galaxies in a cluster is also permeated with an extremely hot plasma known as the intracluster medium. Although this plasma is extremely tenuous, galaxies moving through it experience it almost like swimmers fighting a current, and this interaction can strip galaxies of their star-forming gas.

This interaction between the intracluster medium and the galaxies is called ram shedding and is the process responsible for the trailing tendrils of this jellyfish galaxy. As JW39 moved through the cluster, pressure from the intracluster medium removed gas and dust into long ribbons of star formation that now extend from the galaxy’s disk, reports NASA.

Astronomers using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 studied these trailing tendrils in detail, as they are a particularly extreme environment for star formation. Surprisingly, they found that star formation in the “tentacles” of jellyfish galaxies it was not noticeably different from star formation in the galaxy’s disk.