Spitzer Reveals a Buried Explosion Sparked by a Galactic Train Wreck

Spitzer Reveals a Buried Explosion Sparked by a Galactic Train Wreck
By Adam Hadhazy

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found a stunning burst of star formation that beams out as much infrared light as an entire galaxy. The collision of two spiral galaxies has triggered this explosion, which is cloaked by dust that renders its stars nearly invisible in other wavelengths of light.

The starburst newly revealed by Spitzer stands as the most luminous ever seen taking place away from the centers, or nuclei, of merging parent galaxies. It blazes ten times brighter than the nearby Universe's previous most famous "off-nuclear starburst" that gleams in another galactic smashup known as the Antennae Galaxy.

The new findings show that galaxy mergers can pack a real star-making wallop far from the respective galactic centers, where star-forming dust and gases typically pool.

"This discovery proves that merging galaxies can generate powerful starbursts outside of the centers of the parent galaxies," says Hanae Inami, first author of a paper detailing the results in the July issue of The Astronomical Journal. Inami is a graduate student at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan and the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology. She adds: "The infrared light emission of the starburst dominates its host galaxy and rivals that of the most luminous galaxies we see that are relatively close to our home, the Milky Way."

"No matter how you slice it, this starburst is one of the most luminous objects in the local Universe," agrees Lee Armus, second author of the paper and a senior research astronomer also at the Spitzer Science Center.
A dazzling galactic dust-up

Inami, Armus and their colleagues spotted the buried starburst with Spitzer in the interacting galaxies known as II Zw 096. This galactic train wreck - located around 500 million light years away in the constellation Delphinus (the Dolphin) - will continue to unfold for a few hundred million years. Gravitational forces have already dissolved the once-pinwheel shape of one of II Zw 096's pair of merging galaxies.

The ultra-bright starburst region spans 700 light-years or so - just a tiny portion of II Zw 096, which streams across some 50,000 to 60,000 light-years - yet it blasts out 80 percent of the infrared light from this galactic tumult. Based on Spitzer data, researchers estimate the starburst is cranking out stars at the breakneck pace of around 100 solar masses, or masses of our Sun, per year.

The prodigious energy output of this starburst in a decentralized location as revealed in the infrared has surprised the Spitzer researchers. The new observations go to show how the notion of a cosmic object's nature can change tremendously when viewed at different wavelengths of light. In this way, the shapes and dynamics of distant, harder-to-study galactic mergers could turn out to be a good deal more complex than current observations over a narrow range of wavelengths imply.

"Most of the far-infrared emission in II Zw 096, and hence most of the power, is coming from a region that is not associated with the centers of the merging galaxies," Inami explains. "This suggests that the appearances and interactions of distant, early galaxies during epochs when mergers were much more common than today in the Universe might be more complicated than we think."
A fleeting, perhaps prophetic vista?

In galaxy mergers, individual stars rarely slam into one another because of the vast distances separating them; even in the comparatively crowded central hubs of spiral galaxies, trillions of kilometers still often yawn between the stars.

But giant, diffuse clouds of gas and dust in galaxies do crash together - passing through each other somewhat like ocean waves - and in turn spur the gravitational collapse of dense pockets of matter into new stars. These young, hot stars shine intensely in the energetic ultraviolet part of the spectrum. In the case of II Zw 096, however, a thick shroud of gas and dust still surrounds this stellar brood. The blanket of material absorbs the stars' light and re-radiates it in the lower-energy, infrared wavelengths that gleam clear through the dust to Spitzer's camera.

Astronomers were lucky to capture this transient phase in the evolution of the starburst and of the daughter galaxy that will eventually coalesce out of the collision. "Spitzer has allowed us to see the fireworks before all the gas and dust has cleared away, giving us a preview of the exciting new galaxy being built under the blanket," Inami says.

Merging galaxies such as II Zw 096 also offer a sneak peek at the fate of our Milky Way in some 4.5 billion years when it is expected to plow into its nearest large galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. Off-nuclear starbursts such as that in II Zw 096 and the Antennae Galaxy could occur in the vicinity of our Solar System, perhaps, which is located about two-thirds of the way out from the Milky Way's glowing, bulging center.

"This kind of dramatic thing happening in II Zw 096 could happen to the Milky Way and Andromeda when they meet in the far future," says Inami.

Galaxy on edge

Spiral galaxies are among the most magnificent objects in space. Grand and sprawling, they are icons of the night sky.

Like a snapshot of coins tossed in the air, we see them at all angles, from face-on disks to nearly edge-on lines. And sometimes we catch them so precisely to the side that what we see is hard to believe is real. But then we get pictures like this one from Hubble of the galaxy NGC 4452:

Holy perpendicularity!

There are lots of edge-on galaxies in the sky, like NGC 253 and NGC 4710, but this one is extraordinary. The alignment is perfect, and the disk is incredibly thin. Our Milky Way is 100,000 light years across and 2500 or so light years thick (a ratio of 40:1), but NGC 4452 looks even thinner than that; measuring off the picture I get a width-to-thickness ratio of 100:1.

Other things are obvious, too, and honestly a bit weird. For one thing, the central bulge of the galaxy is very small; in most edge-on galaxies it pokes above and below the disk like in NGC 4565, shown here. In that picture you can also see lots of dark dust; that’s actually complex organic molecules that are very efficient at absorbing visible light. They’re created when stars are born and when they die, and dust clouds tend to huddle close to the center of the disk.

[Note added later: It occurs to me there might be dust in the galaxy despite what I say in the next paragraph. That's because dust doesn't show up in the infrared very well, and one of the filters used was IR (as I note in a following paragraph). Also, the kind of camera used isn't as sensitive in the blue as it is in the IR, so that might also suppress seeing any dust that might be there. So take the next paragraph with -- haha -- a grain of salt.]

But NGC 4452 appears denuded of dust! I’ve never seen a galaxy quite so clean. I think it would actually pass the white glove test. As it happens, this galaxy is part of a nearby cluster called the Virgo Cluster, a collection of hundreds of galaxies about 60 million light years away. In between the galaxies is a thin fog of gas, and as the galaxies orbit each other they plow through this gas. The high speeds at which they travel can actually strip them of their own gas and dust, like when you open your car window while driving to get rid of, um, say, an obnoxious smell. Perhaps this is what happened to NGC 4452.

The disk is surrounded by a fuzzy glow, which would be the collected light from billions of stars above and below the disk. Note that if you look to the extreme edges of the disk, the fuzzy glow appears to subtly bend down on the left and up on the right. The galaxy is warped! This is common in disk galaxies (the Milky Way and nearby Andromeda galaxies are warped, and you can also see it in NGC 5866). It’s usually caused by a gravitational torque, an off-center tug, from a nearby galaxy. Since NGC 4522 is in a cluster, it’s not too surprising there might be some galaxy that could do this.

And finally, one more thing. Look at all the distant background galaxies in the picture! There are dozens of them scattered about, most much, much farther away. Mind you, this picture of NGC 4452 is a short exposure; just a combination of 12.5 minutes using a blue filter and 20 using an infrared one. This means the sky is filled with galaxies!

And each one is an island Universe, made of billions of stars along with massive gas and dust clouds, and each as spectacular and amazing as this one seen up close.

Engineers Assessing Cassini Spacecraft

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are working to understand what caused NASA's Cassini spacecraft to put itself into "safe mode," a precautionary standby mode. Cassini entered safe mode around 4 p.m. PDT (7 p.m. EDT) on Tuesday, Nov. 2.

Since going into safe mode, the spacecraft has performed as expected, suspending the flow of science data and sending back only data about engineering and spacecraft health. Cassini is programmed to put itself into safe mode automatically any time it detects a condition on the spacecraft that requires action from mission controllers on the ground.

Engineers say it is not likely that Cassini will be able to resume full operations before a planned Nov. 11 flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. But Cassini has 53 more Titan flybys planned in its extended mission, which lasts until 2017.

"The spacecraft responded exactly as it should have, and I fully expect that we will get Cassini back up and running with no problems," said Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager based at JPL. "Over the more than six years we have been at Saturn, this is only the second safing event. So considering the complexity of demands we have made on Cassini, the spacecraft has performed exceptionally well for us."

Since Cassini launched in 1997, Cassini has put itself into safe mode a total of six times.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.