NGC 4449 tagged posts

Stars make oxygen for small galaxies, but they lose most of it

A view of a dwarf galaxy in space -- bright white blobs are randomly spread, long with blue and pinking ones, against a backdrop of black
Image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 4449, one of the dwarf galaxies in the Galaxies Losing Oxygen via Winds (GLOW) study. Credit: NASA, ESA, Alessandra Aloisi (STScI, ESA), Hubble Heritage–ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Scientists examining data collected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found that dozens of small galaxies contain far less oxygen than their stars are estimated to have produced. The researchers, including a Rutgers astrophysicist, studied 37 dwarf galaxies, which are much smaller than the Milky Way and considered to be nearby, within 22 million light-years of Earth. The results were published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Members of the team compared estimates of how much oxygen the galaxies’ stars had made over their lifetimes with the amount remaining ...

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