admin Jellyfish galaxy JW39, located in a hostile galaxy cluster, is exposed to intense gravity and hot plasma known as the cluster’s inner environment. These conditions starve JW39 of its star-forming gas, creating elongated star-forming bands. However, the study indicates that the star formation in these “tentacles” mirrors the formation of the galaxy’s main disk.
The JW39 jellyfish galaxy hangs in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy is located more than 900 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices and is one of many jellyfish galaxies that Hubble has studied over the past two years.
Despite the peaceful appearance of this jellyfish galaxy, it drifts in a fiercely hostile environment; a galaxy cluster. Compared to their more isolated counterparts, galaxies in galaxy clusters are often warped by the gravity of larger neighboring galaxies, which can twist galaxies into a variety of odd shapes and shapes. Great. If that weren’t enough, the intergalactic space within a cluster is also invaded by an extremely hot plasma known as the cluster inner medium. Although this plasma is extremely thin, galaxies passing through it experience it almost like swimmers against water, and this interaction can strip galaxies of star-forming gas.
This interaction between the environment within the cluster and the galaxies is known as dynamic pressure stripping and is the process responsible for the elongated veins of this jellyfish galaxy. As JW39 moved through the cluster, pressure from the environment inside the cluster pushed gas and dust into long star-forming ice sheets that are now receding from the galaxy’s disk. .
Astronomers using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 have studied these elongated veins in detail because they are a particularly harsh environment for star formation. Surprisingly, they found that star formation in the “tentacles” of jellyfish galaxies was not significantly different from star formation in the galactic disk.
