Gigantic Magnetic Ropes Seen In Whale Galaxy’s Halo

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – For the first time, an image of large-scale, coherent, magnetic fields in the halo of a faraway spiral galaxy known as NGC 4631, the “Whale Galaxy,” has been captured by a team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville.

Astronomers used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope.

 Composite image of the galaxy NGC 4631, the "Whale Galaxy," revealing large magnetic structures. Credit: Jayanne English of the University of Manitoba, with NRAO VLA radio data from Silvia Carolina Mora-Partiarroyo and Marita Krause of the Max-Planck Institute for Radio AstronomyComposite image of the galaxy NGC 4631, the “Whale Galaxy,” revealing large  magnetic structures. Credit: Jayanne English of the University of Manitoba, with NRAO VLA radio data from Silvia Carolina Mora-Partiarroyo and Marita Krause of the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy

NGC 4631, the “Whale Galaxy”, located 25 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici, is about 80 thousand light-years across, slightly smaller than our own Milky Way. It was discovered by the famous German-born British astronomer Sir William Herschel in 1787. This galaxy has a companion, NGC 4627, a small elliptical galaxy.

“To understand how stars like the sun and planets like Earth came to be, we must understand how galaxies, such as our Milky Way, form and evolve,” Matthew Benacquista, a project director in NSF’s division of Astronomical Sciences, said in a press release.

“This project is an attempt to measure galactic magnetic fields and learn how they influence the way that interstellar gases are ejected from galaxy disks and contribute to galaxy formation and evolution.”

The spiral galaxy, identified as NGC 4631 or the “Whale Galaxy,” is seen edge-on in the image (above), with its disk of stars shown in pink. The field lines are shown in green and blue, extending beyond the disk into the galaxy’s extended halo.

Green indicates filaments with their magnetic field pointing roughly toward the viewer, and blue indicates filaments with their magnetic fields pointing away. This phenomenon, with the field alternating in direction, has never been seen before in the halo of a galaxy.

More – here

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Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff