A new type of monsters was spotted in our cosmos: the super spiral galaxies, enormous galaxies that can be as big as fours times the size of the Milky Way or 14 times its brightness.
As scientists looked for the brightest galaxies of NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, that contains more than 100 trillion galaxies, they were expecting to find ordinary, elliptical galaxies. But, for their surprise, 53 of these shiny concentration of stars were rare, mysterious and humongous super spirals, that make our dear Milky Way seem small -- “galactic beasts”, as NASA called them, 1.2 billion light years away.
Patrick Ogle, from the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, says:"We have found a previously unrecognized class of spiral galaxies that are as luminous and massive as the biggest, brightest galaxies we know of. It's as if we have just discovered a new land animal stomping around that is the size of an elephant but had shockingly gone unnoticed by zoologists."
In theory, spiral galaxies should not be that big, because their structure only allows for a limited number of stars. A good explanation to these newly - found galaxies is that two galaxies have collided and, instead of becoming a standard elliptical galaxy, their gases interact and form this enormous spiral. The double-nuclei found in 4 out of the 53 galaxies supports the previous idea, as if, according to NASA, they were yolks from two eggs that are being fried in the same pan.
"Super spirals could fundamentally change our understanding of the formation and evolution of the most massive galaxies," says Ogle, who published this discovery on The Astrophysicist Journal.. "We have much to learn from these newly identified, galactic leviathans."
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