A brand new image from the Dark Energy Camera peels back the layers of a “galactic onion” whose shells extend 150,000 light-years into space.
Positioned about 70 million light-years from Earth, the shell galaxy NGC 3923 — a style of elliptical galaxy — was photographed using the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope on the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which is operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).
NGC 3923 exhibits symmetrical, onion-like layers that likely formed from a galactic merger, during which a bigger galaxy slowly siphoned stars away from the disk of a smaller spiral galaxy. Those stars step by step mixed into the larger galaxy’s halo, forming the resulting combo galaxy’s concentric shells, in keeping with an announcement from the NSF’s NOIRLab.
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“The shells of NGC 3923 make the galaxy quite exceptional,” officials said within the statement. “Not only does it have the most important known shell of all observed shell galaxies, but it surely also has the most important variety of shells and the most important ratio between the radii of the outermost and innermost shells.”
Observations of NGC 3923 suggest it could have as many as 42 shells, in truth, which look like more subtle than those of other shell galaxies. Its outermost layers were created first, followed by those closer to the galaxy’s core. Spanning 150,000 light-years across, NGC 3923 is about 50% larger than our Milky Way.
“Its shells are also interestingly symmetrical, while other shell galaxies are more skewed,” officials said within the statement. “These unusual features are a sublime example of the unique structures that galaxies can embody depending on their specific evolutionary conditions.”
The recent Dark Energy Camera image also captures a handful of other galaxies and a big gravitational lens across the galaxy cluster PLCK G287.0+32.9, positioned near the highest of the image. Gravitational lensing occurs when massive objects with powerful gravitational fields bend and magnify light from more distant sources, causing the objects to seem stretched out.
“Gravitational lenses allow astronomers to explore probably the most profound questions of our Universe, including the character of dark matter and the worth of the Hubble constant, which defines the expansion of the Universe,” NOIRLab officials said within the statement.