The Medusa merger galaxy is the site of a galactic mystery

By Georgina Torbet Published April 28, 2022

This Hubble Picture of the Week shows a galaxy with an especially evocative name: The Medusa merger. ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Adamo

This week’s Hubble image features a legendary monster: The Medusa, who gave her name to the merging of two galaxies which are now known as one entity, the Medusa merger. Located 130 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear), this merger was created when one larger galaxy collided with a smaller system rich in gas and devoured it, sending out sprays of dust and stars.

Recommended Videos

It is these streams of dust spreading out into space that gave the galaxy its name. If you look in the top part of the upper section of the galaxy, you can see red strands reaching out into space. These dusty tendrils were thought to resemble snakes, like the snakes which the monster Medusa had on her head in place of hair in ancient Greek mythology. It was said that anyone who beheld Medusa directly would be turned to stone, until the hero Perseus defeated her using a mirrored shield which let him see her reflection.

Like the Gorgon of legend, the Medusa merger also has its own eye. Looking into the region at the center of the merging galaxies, known as Medusa’s eye, won’t turn you into stone but it will let you observe a region of active star formation, in which dust and gas are becoming dense and hot and are creating new stars.

The eye region is unusual in that the gases that flow there are much hotter than similar regions in other galaxies, with temperatures reaching over 300 degrees Kelvin (27°C or 80°F). This high temperature heats the nearby dust and causes it to glow with a shorter infrared wavelength, or a more reddish tinge.

Astronomers have proposed two reasons that this could be the case in this particular region of this particular galaxy: Firstly, it could be that the gas which is flowing toward the hotter, denser center of the galaxy experiences shocks when it collides with the interstellar medium inside the eye, heating the gas to higher temperatures. Or secondly, the shocks could be the result of a supernova or radiation from stars forming within a massive star cluster. To discover which of these is correct, scientists will need to take higher-resolution measurements of the galaxy and its red eye in particular.

Georgina Torbet

Former Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

Topics

Space

Lightsails have hit another speed bump on the road to interstellar travel

The coolest interstellar travel idea may get betrayed by the light pushing it

LightSail in Earth orbit

Laser-powered lightsails are one of the coolest answers to spaceflight. It might not be as sci-fi-sounding as a warp drive, but now, its practicality has also come under question. Using lightsails, a spacecraft could unfurl an ultra-thin reflective sail and let a powerful laser push it toward another star, without relying on fuel.

The tech was simple and elegant--except it's also more complicated than it sounds. A new preprint from researchers Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology suggests that relativistic lightsails may run into a hidden propulsion problem once they start moving extremely fast.

Space

The galaxy has an exoplanet size mystery, and NASA’s EVE mission wants to solve it

This planet-hunting mission wants to catch baby worlds before they grow up

Artist’s Illustration of Exoplanets Orbiting Barnard’s Star

Mankind venturing into space ended up creating more questions than it answered, and one of the dilemmas is related to the planet sizes. Astronomers have found plenty of rocky super-Earths and plenty of puffier sub-Neptunes, but far fewer planets with a radius of about 1.8 times Earth’s.

That gap is known as the radius valley, and a proposed mission called the Early eVolution Explorer, or EVE, wants to figure out why it exists. NASA has a simple plan: look at planets while they are still young. The mission concept, detailed in a new arXiv preprint and covered by Phys.org, would focus on newly formed star clusters to see what small planets look like before billions of years of evolution.

Cars

We just got a hot signal that a Tesla and SpaceX merger could happen, after all

Tesla

For years, the idea of Tesla and SpaceX becoming a single company has lived somewhere between ambitious business theory and Elon Musk fan fiction. The two companies already share DNA, leadership influence, engineering talent, and long-term goals. But every time the topic surfaced, it felt more like an interesting thought experiment than a realistic possibility. Now, one of the most important people at SpaceX has added fresh fuel to the conversation.

Speaking in a recent CNBC interview, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell was asked about the possibility of closer ties between Tesla and SpaceX. Her response wasn’t a flat-out denial. In fact, she suggested that bringing the two companies together could make life a little easier for Musk. That may sound like an offhand comment, but coming from Shotwell, it’s noteworthy. She’s been at SpaceX since its earliest days and remains one of the company's most influential executives.