(ORDO NEWS) — Astronomers have noticed that the distribution of stars in the Triangulum galaxy strongly depends on age.
The Triangulum Galaxy is about 850 kiloparsecs from the Milky Way and is a satellite of the large Andromeda galaxy.
It turned out that old and young stars in it have a completely different distribution structure in space.
“The youngest and oldest stars in the Triangulum that we can see with Hubble’s array of filters are organized quite differently,” said Adam Smerchina, a researcher at the University of Washington. – It’s amazing.
In many galaxies, such as the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, the distribution of stars is about the same, regardless of their age.”
In total, Hubble has acquired hundreds of high-resolution images of various parts of the Triangulum galaxy. The scientists combined these images to create a comprehensive data set.
It turned out that the distribution of younger, massive stars – less than 1 billion years old – has a flocculent appearance. It is precisely these structures that scientists noticed earlier in low-resolution images.
Older, redder stars, however, are distributed quite differently, with two spiral arms radiating from a rectangular band at the center of the galaxy.
Scientists do not know the reason for the observed phenomenon. Perhaps this distribution is due to the fact that Triangulum is a satellite galaxy.
In such galaxies, the stellar population can be quite unusual due to the interaction with the neighboring large galaxy.
Thus, the largest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud, is similar in size and mass to Triangulum, but has an irregular spherical shape due to its proximity to our galaxy.
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