Green peas and beans in space

It’s December 2012, when astronomers were looking through mega cam on me Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, they jump. What they are seeing is perhaps one of the rarest galaxies in the universe. They don’t know it yet, but they’ve discovered a new type of galaxy. I was baptized J2240 And it turned out to be about 3.7 billion light years away far away in a constellationAquarium.

This particular type of galaxy gives a Bright green light Which gave her a nickname Green Bean Galaxy or “Green Bean Galaxy”. But what is the reason for this color? It’s because of the massive clouds of gas around the center of the galaxy. Normally, giant gas clouds emit a specific color depending on how dense they are and what they’re made of. In the detectable spectrum, for example, hydrogen glows red when hot and fluffy, while oxygen, when very hot and fluffy, glows brittle green. This tells us that This galaxy is full of oxygen, or at least, enough to light up the entire galaxy the color of grass. The cloud actually has equal energy ten billion times that the sun.

Oxygen does not normally emit light spontaneously but must ionize. the Giant black hole located in the center of the galaxy, which makes it shine like a light bulb, thanks to the x-rays it emits. At first glance, though, it would seem that because the light from the galaxy isn’t as dazzling as it should be, the supermassive black hole probably doesn’t have enough fuel to fuel itself.

This may be because, perhaps 4 billion years ago, matter fell into the central black hole and led to the formation of the accretion disk, which gave the galaxy its special colour. However, later the supply of the substance was stopped. The gas in the periphery can continue to glow for a certain amount of time, while it continues to slowly fade and die in a process known as radioresonance.

So far they only know each other 16 galaxies from this type. This tells us that if we drew a cube 1.3 billion light-years across in the universe, there would only be one cube. This gives the Green Bean Galaxy a status The rarest galaxy exists in the universe.

Another type of rare galaxy is Green Pea Galaxy “Green Pea Galaxies”. They are called this because of their small size and greenish appearance when they are first observed during Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This type of galaxy is compact and has an extension rich oxygen emission. They are low in mass and size, generally less than 16,000 light-years in diameter, and are usually found in sparse environments that have a density lower (about two-thirds) than that of normal galactic environments.

This galaxy has a mass of approx 3 billion solar masses It forms the equivalent of 10 solar masses of stars annually. When the entire SDSS optical catalog was searched, 40,222 objects were returned, leading to the conclusion that GPs are rare organisms. Many of these galaxies could have been found in the early universe, but today we no longer see such active galaxies, and studying them helps us understand how the formation and evolution of galaxies occurred at the beginning of the life of the universe.

The deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe ever taken by the cosmos is from July 2022 JWST Telescopewhich captured thousands of galaxies inside and outside the cluster SMACS J0723.3-7327. Thanks to the effect of gravitational lensing, acting on its mass, which magnifies and distorts the appearance of background galaxies, it was possible to track down three compact infrared objects that appear to be far Relatives of the cosmic pea.

The most distant of these three galaxies appears magnified about 10 times, adding to the telescope’s already good performance. Two of the galaxies identified by JWST contain about 20% more oxygen than our own Milky Way while the third galaxy is much more exotic. In fact, it contains only 2% of the oxygen of a galaxy like ours and could be the most chemically primitive galaxy ever identified.

Observing these objects is like plunging back into the past, projecting yourself back to 13.1 billion years ago, when the universe was about 5% of its current age, and seeing young galaxies, full of young stars and glowing gas containing a few elements reprocessed by the stars.