Washington, May 25 (ANI): Computer simulations of galaxies have shown that cold gas - fuel for stars - spirals into their cores along filaments and rapidly make its way towards their centers.
Once there, they converted into new stars, and the galaxies bulk up in mass.
Lead author Kyle Stewart said that galaxy formation is really chaotic and that it took them several hundred computer processors, over months of time, to simulate and learn more about how this process works.
Since billions of years is taken by a galaxy to grow, Stewart and his team simulated the process using supercomputers at JPL; NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.; and the University of California, Irvine.
They ran four different simulations of the formation of a galaxy like our Milky Way, starting from just 57 million years after the big bang until present day.
The simulations began with the starting ingredients for galaxies-hydrogen, helium and dark matter-and then let the laws of physics take over to create their galactic masterpieces. Supercomputers are needed due to the enormous number of interactions.
When the galaxy concoctions were ready, they inspected the information, finding new clues about how cold gas sinks into the galaxy centers.
The new results confirm that cold gas flows along filaments and show for the first time that the gas is spinning around faster than previously believed.
The simulations also revealed that the gas is making its way down to the centers of galaxies more quickly than what occurs in the "hot-mode" of galaxy formation, in about 1 billion years.
The results help answer a riddle in astronomy about galaxies with large extended disks of material spinning around them, far from their centers.
Researchers didn't understand how the outer material could be spinning so fast. The cold-mode allows for this rapid spinning, fitting another jigsaw piece into the puzzle of how galaxies grow.
The new study is set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal. (ANI)
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