With their winding and buff arms made up of billions of stars, spiral galaxies offer some of the beautiful images of the universe. Our own Milky Way galaxy is a spiral galaxy, yet these types of swirling clusters are relatively scarce in a part of the universe called the Supergalactic Plane. A team of astrophysicists believes that the bright elliptical galaxies without a defined center are more common than swirling galaxies because of the difference in density of the environments found inside and outside of the Plane. The findings are described in a study published November 20 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
[Related: Behold six galactic collisions, masterfully captured by Hubble.]
Smoothing out the arms
The Supergalactic Plane is a flattened structure in the universe that extends nearly a billion light years across. Our own Milky Way galaxy is embedded within the Plane and is about 100,000 light years wide. There are dozens of enormous armless galaxy clusters called elliptical galaxies in the Plane, but not nearly as many disk-shaped galaxies with spiral arms.Â
According to the new study, the different distributions of elliptical and disk galaxies are a natural occurrence. Galaxies experience frequent interactions and mergers with other galaxies in the Plane because the region is so densely packed. This galactic demolition derby then turns the spiral galaxies into elliptical galaxies. The arms are smoothed out and the lack of internal structure in the elliptical galaxy and presence of dark matter leads to the growth of supermassive black holes. Since the dark matter…
Read the full article here