A zoom-in on the galaxy ESO 137-011, which is one of the more disturbing-looking places in the universe. The long blue streamers are millions of stars that have been basically “blown” out of the galaxy by the thin intergalactic medium that the galaxy is passing through. It’s zipping through the Norma galactic cluster, and is hitting a really strong “wind” that’s stripping the interstellar gas out of the galaxy. A result of that is that the gas is getting shocked and quickly forming hot blue stars, but these stars are out of the galaxy and short lived. The galaxy is being denuded of feedstock for *new* stars. As the bigger stars blow themselves up, the gases they release are getting blown away. What’ll be left are the stars that don’t blow themselves up… typically the smaller, cooler, longer-lived stars. The end result will, many hundreds of millions of years down the line, is a galaxy populated by sullen little red dwarfs and not a whole lot else.
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A Hubble photo. The high-rez version can be downloaded HERE.
And here’s mashup of the Hubble view with an X-Ray view from Chandra, showing the incredibly long stream of gas. High rez available HERE.
It’s sad-looking, but danged if it ain’t awesome.
Here’s a good video explaining what’s going on, using someone with a Bond supervillainess accent as a narrator.
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