The collision of the strangest galaxies.

in Popular STEM9 hours ago

The collision of the strangest galaxies.



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On Earth, one of the inhabitants of the forests are the owls and what you are going to see now is a cosmic owl, is the name that the international team of astronomers has given what they have captured and which they announced on June 11, 2025, on the Arxiv pre-print server.


What they have captured is something extremely rare, it is the merger of two annular galaxies that resemble the look of a buo, some galaxy mergers give rise to the formation of collision ring galaxies, that is usually quite rare since only a few hundred cases have been detected in the local universe, by local universe we refer to the one that is less than 1 billion light years from us.


The researchers do not mention how far away this “cosmic owl” is, but it would be within this local universe that the rings of these galaxies are formed when another galaxy passes directly through the disk in an almost head-on collision, which causes the expulsion of gas and stars forming a circular or almost circular pattern, something like a bullet passing through a cloud of smoke. The important thing is that finding one of this type is rare, but finding two of almost the same size that are also colliding is extremely rare.



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Perhaps it is the only case in the local universe, the structures of collision rings are almost identical, each one has a diameter of approximately 26,000 light years, it is estimated that together the two galaxies have a mass of approximately 320,000 million solar masses, it sounds a lot, but in reality it is less than the mass of our Milky Way galaxy, depending on the estimates it would have between slightly more than double to three times more mass, even so we would be talking about that in those rings there would be several hundred million stars like the Sun orbited by planets like the Earth, in the habitable zone of their systems.


If the most recent estimate gives about 400 million Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, in the eyes of that “cosmic owl” there would be from just over 100 million to about 200 million planets similar to ours orbiting stars similar to the sun in the habitable zone of their star. If there were conscious beings on those planets or on at least one of them, they would see an amazing spectacle in their night skies, although also a disturbing spectacle because the Astronomers who have done this work offer us one last piece of information and that is that in the center of each of those eyes of the cosmic owl there is a supermassive black hole.



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One is 67 million solar masses and another is 26 million solar masses. They are not the largest in the universe, but they are much larger than the one that exists in the center of the Milky Way. The estimate is that Sagittarius A*, which is what our super massive black hole is called, has only 4.1 million solar masses. If Sagittarius A* were close to the center of one of those eyes of the cosmic owl, it would be trapped by the gravity of the super black holes. massive and would enter orbit around them like a satellite or be devoured without problems.


And there is something more disturbing about this story, these black holes of the buo are active, they are eating material, clouds of gas, dust, planets, stars, everything that gets too close to them and this activity produces dangerous jets of energy, the most intense is that of the northwestern eye, if there were habitable planets in the middle they would be sterilized by the energy and radiation of that jet.


In short, the authors of the discovery highlight the unique properties of the “cosmic owl” and say that what is happening in its eyes is a window into understanding how supermassive black holes work and how terrifying they can be.





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