Astronomers from the Spanish University of La Laguna conducted a study of the relict galaxy NGC 1277, in which the formation of new stars stopped. Researchers report that this system has remained virtually unchanged over the past 10 billion years. The details of the observations were reported by the scientists in a press release published by the EurekAlert website.
The galaxy was originally discovered back in 1875 by the British astronomer Lawrence Parsons. But since then, little has been known about her. The Hubble Space Telescope helped scientists study the galaxy NGC 1277, located 220 million light-years from Earth. Astronomers have found that the galaxy is made up of old red stars, twice the number of stars in the Milky Way. At the same time, NGC 1277 is almost half the size of our galaxy. Typically, such relict galaxies are located billions of light years from the solar system.
Researchers believe that at some point, the relict system simply stopped collecting matter from the intergalactic medium, which is necessary for its transformation into an ordinary spiral galaxy, and as a result, it remained in the transitional link of lenticular galaxies.
There are many globular clusters of red stars around NGC 1277. According to the researchers, it was they who influenced the original shape of the galaxy. Typically, blue globular clusters should appear at later stages of evolution, which indicates that the system is beginning to absorb or collide with other galaxies. As a result of the influx of interstellar matter, new star formation processes are launched. However, in NGC 1277, blue stars are almost completely absent.
The relic galaxy is located near the Perseus cluster, which consists of more than a thousand galaxies. NGС 1277 moves at a speed of about three million kilometers per hour, which is too fast for that, so it simply does not have time to attract matter from other star systems.
It is also known that near the center of the galaxy is one of the most massive black holes in the universe. Scientists have found that the interstellar gas in this area is too hot to condense and form new stars.
Nikolay Khizhnyak