Image of galaxy tail. Credit: Image courtesy of International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR)
Astronomers have discovered a spectacular tail of gas more than 300,000 light years across coming from a nearby galaxy in the Virgo cluster, a group of galaxies 55 million light years from our own Milky Way. The plume is made up of hydrogen gas – the material new stars are made of – and is 5X longer than the galaxy itself. The discovery was made by an international team of scientists led by Dr Alessandro Boselli at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in France. Scientists noticed long ago that galaxy NGC 4569 contained less gas than expected but they could not see where it had gone.
“We didn’t have the smoking gun, the clear evidence of direct removal of gas from the galaxy,” ...
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