If we want to understand the universe, we must know not only what we are looking at, but also how it came to be. After years of research, scientists from the University of California, San Diego have just announced that the mystery of radio circuits has finally been solved. in Latest scientific article The researchers, who published in the journal Nature, believe that these mysterious rings are a type of shells formed by galactic winds driven by the explosions of massive stars.
This conclusion was made by researchers who studied the so-called star-forming galaxies in which very intense processes of new star formation are currently taking place. Such galaxies also experience many supernova explosions, which end the lives of massive stars. In each such explosion, star-forming gas is released from the explosion site at high speed into space. If several such explosions occur simultaneously in a limited area, the force of the explosion accelerates the gas so much that it is able to escape the galactic gravity and fly into intergalactic space.
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The ASKAP radio telescope is capable of scanning huge areas of the sky simultaneously in the radio range. Thanks to this, he was able to discover unusual radio loops (ORCs) at the beginning of his work. Each of these rings is hundreds of thousands of light-years in diameter. For comparison, our Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter. Although many possible explanations have been generated, none of them have been convincing enough.
The authors of the latest study decided to check whether ORC rings did not form at later stages of the evolution of star-forming galaxies. For this purpose, scientists looked to an object labeled ORC 4. Previously, the rings were only observed at radio wavelengths. However, they have now been studied using a spectrometer installed at the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii. During the observations, it was found that there was a large amount of hot, compressed gas inside ORC 4. This meant that scientists were on the right track. Researchers took a closer look at the ORC 4 galaxy, also in visible and infrared light. It turns out that the age of stars and galaxies is about 6 billion years. Furthermore, this galaxy was a star-forming galaxy about a billion years ago.
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Scientists decided to use computer simulations to recreate the size of the radio ring surrounding the galaxy. They found that galactic winds caused by star formation blew in this galaxy for 200 million years and then stopped. Despite everything, the shock wave continued to push the hot gas out of the galaxy, forming a ring around it. Over time, the cold gas returned to the host galaxy.
It turns out that the galaxies studied by astronomers were characterized by a very high rate of gas evacuation from the galaxy. The shock wave generated by this gas in the intergalactic medium is responsible for the formation of mysterious radio rings. Ironically, although galactic winds explain radio rings, radio rings can now tell us more about galactic winds and the processes that occur in star-forming galaxies. Scientists hope to find out how many galaxies are spewing gas into intergalactic space, how long these winds last, and thus whether ORC rings are a common phenomenon in the universe.
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