Resulting Structures of Galactic Collisions :: Essays Papers

Resulting Structures of Galactic Collisions In the visible universe, there is one(a) casing of event that is often responsible for a good deal of the alter phenomena we observe across the cosmos. A instance of event whose effects ar both destructive and creative. This event is the moveion of two or more than galaxies. The results of a galactic interaction are so varied that each event is unique. Therefore, only a select few examples will be described in the following pages. An examination of the term galactic interaction does not immediately convey much in the way of spirit as to exactly what happens during one of these events. The problem is that the word interaction is sanely ambiguous, yet it must be so because two galaxies can interact in so many ways that liter all toldy every interaction we observe is a unique event (depending on how close one looks at the details). Changing the mass ratios, the angle of impact, or the morphological type of the progenitor gal axies can greatly influence the nature of the system aft(prenominal) the interaction has played itself out, as we shall visualize. However, galactic interactions do often percent many characteristics. The most notable feature associated with interacting galaxies is often the starburst phenomenon. A starburst is an highly high rate of star institution over part or all of a galaxy over a cosmologically short result of time (possibly a few billion years as argue to several billion years). Galaxy interactions cause gravitational instabilities in interstellar gas clouds, which compress the gas in the clouds and trigger star formation (Mouri 2003). When astronomers look at an ongoing starburst in a distant galaxy, they see the starburst as a bluer region than the surrounding parts of the host galaxy. That is due to the extremely hot and energetic, yet short lived, O-type stars produced in the burst, which outshine all of the other stars being born around them as well as the old er, redder stars that populate the galaxy. For an example of a galaxy undergoing an interaction- induced starburst, let us look at M82, a member of a nearby collection of galaxies. M82 is a rather disturbed-looking disk galaxy that is currently undergoing a monumental amount of star formation in its nuclear region. The cause is theorized to be a close encounter between M82 and M81, its large neighbor, which occurred about a billion years ago (Lipscy & Plavchan 2003).