Saturday, October 5 2024 07:21 AEST

Galaxies Get More Chaotic As They Age

An international team led by Australian research centre ASTRO 3D reports that age is the driving force in changing how stars move within galaxies.

We’ve known for a while that the orderly movement in a galaxies early life would give way to seemingly chaotic and random movement in older galaxies, but scientists have been uncertain about what causes this – possibly the surrounding environment or the mass of the galaxy itself but this new study shows that it’s neither of those things – it’s just getting old.

But the earlier work is not necessarily incorrect, says second author Dr Jesse van de Sande. Young galaxies are star-forming super-factories, while in older ones, star formation ceases.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, still has a thin star forming disk, so is still considered a high spin rotational galaxy. The study allows astronomers to rule out many processes when trying to understand galaxy formation and so fine-tune models of how the Universe has developed.

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