Friday, August 17, 2012

The Phoenix Mega-Cluster Producing Stars After Billions of Years of Silence?

Astronomy has long held that galaxies at the center of most clusters may have been dormant for billions of years. But astronomers using the Chandra X-ray, the National Science Foundation's South Pole Telescope observatory and eight other world-class observatories studying the Phoenix cluster, which is one of the largest structures in the universe, located 5.7 billion light years from Earth, central galaxy is producing new stars at a prodigious rate.

This is bound to bring about a major rethink of how mega-structures like Phoenix, and the galaxies contained there - in, evolve. Scientists believe that the huge reservoir of star forming gas should, over time, cool and in-fall to the central galaxy to provide for massive star formation. The reason that has not taken place, it is theorized, is that the super massive black hole in the center of other super clusters is pumping so much energy into the system, as in the Perseus cluster, that the gas is prevented from cooling and forming new stars. This goes against everything what is being observed in Phoenix.

read the Daily Galaxy article Here for more info on how the black hole keeps stars from forming in the central galaxy of a mega cluster.  Click the title for the WIKIPEDIA link

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