Rubin Observatory Discovers Surprise ‘Tail’ on Iconic Galaxy

The Rubin Observatory discovered an unexpected “tail” in the legendary galaxy

TO Jenna Ahart & Nature magazine

Just a few months after his highly anticipated debut, Vera K. Rubin Observatory begins to fulfill its promise to rewrite cosmic history. The colossal observatory chamber, located on a mountaintop in Chile, has not yet begun formal scientific research. But just looking at it first test imageastronomers have discovered a surprise: a trail of light called a stellar stream coming from a well-known galaxy, suggesting that the galaxy once tore apart a much smaller galaxy.

“This is the first stellar stream detected from Rubin,” says Sarah Pearson, an astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen. “And it's just a precursor to all the many, many features we'll find on this kind of thing.” Authors reported their findings V Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.

The tail that tells tales

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The galaxy, named Messier 61, was first discovered in 1779 in the Virgo galaxy cluster and has attracted the attention of astronomers ever since. Messier 61, which hosts many supernovae and produces new stars at a surprisingly high rate, is known as a starburst galaxy due to its abundance of stellar activity.

Astronomers used several powerful telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, to unravel the structure of the galaxy. But “despite all this intensive research, no one has ever found this stellar stream,” says Aaron Romanowski, an astronomer at San Jose State University in California and an author of the study.

After carefully studying the first image of Ruby, taken by the world's largest digital camera, the team filtered out excess light to reveal the galaxy's stellar flow. The stellar trail is 55 kiloparsecs or 180,000 light years long, making it one of the longest streams discovered. It likely originated from a dwarf galaxy that was torn apart by the gravity of Messier 61. The authors note that such interactions could accelerate star formation in Messier 61 and begin to explain some of the galaxy's anomalies.

First image of Ruby captures ten million galaxies, and this is just an appetizer for the observations to come. Over the next decade, Rubin will capture light from 20 billion galaxies, more than any other observatory to date.

“Every single galaxy is expected to be surrounded by these flows. This is a fundamental part of how galaxies are created,” says Romanovsky. “We just need to look weaker, and that’s the hope with Rubin.”

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