According to the latest cosmological models, large spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way grew by absorbing smaller galaxies, by a sort of galactic cannibalism. Evidence for this is given by very large structures, the tidal stellar streams, which are observed around them, which are the remains of these satellite galaxies. But the full histories of the majority of these cases are hard to study, because these flows of stars are very faint, and only the remains of the most recent mergers have been detected.
A study led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), with the participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has made detailed observations of a large tidal flow around the Sombrero galaxy, whose strange morphology has still not been definitively explained. The results are published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
The Sombrero galaxy (Messier 104) is a galaxy some thirty million light years away, which is part of the Local Supercluster (a group of galaxies which includes the Virgo cluster and the Local Group containing the Milky Way). It has roughly one third of the diameter of the Milky Way, and shows characteristics of both of the dominant types of galaxies in the Universe, the spirals and the ellipticals. It has spiral arms, and a very large bright central bulge, which makes it look like a hybrid of the two types.
“Our motive for obtaining these very deep images of the Sombrero galaxy (Messier 104) was to look for the remains of its merger with a very massive galaxy. This possible collision was recently suggested on the basis of studies of the stellar population of its strange halo obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope,” says David Martínez-Delgado, a researcher at the IAA-CSIC and first author of the paper reporting the work.
The observations with the Hubble, in 2020, showed that the halo, an extensive and faint region surrounding the Sombrero galaxy, shows many stars rich in metals, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This is a feature to typical of new generations of stars, which are normally found in the discs of galaxies, and are quite unusual in galactic halos, which are populated by old stars. To explain their presence astronomers suggested what is known as “a wet merger,” a scenario in which a large elliptical galaxy is rejuvenated by large quantities of gas and dust from another massive galaxy, which went into the formation of the disc which we now observe.
“In our images we have not found any evidence to support this hypothesis, although we cannot rule out that it could have happened several thousand million years ago, and the debris is completely dissipated by now -explains David Martínez-Delgado-. In our search we have in fact been able to trace for the first time the complete tidal stream which surrounds the disc of this galaxy, and our theoretical simulations have let us reconstruct its formation in the last three thousand million years, by cannibalism of a satellite dwarf galaxy.”
“Observational techniques in present day Astrophysics need advanced image processing. Our modelling of the bright stars around the Sombrero galaxy, and at the same time of the halo light of the galaxy itself has enabled us to unveil the nature of this tidal stream. It is remarkable that thanks to these advanced photometric techniques we have been able to do front line science with a Messier object using only an 18 cm (diameter) telescope,” explains Javier Román, a postdoctoral researcher at the IAC and a co-author of the study.
The research team rejects the idea that the large stellar tidal stream, known for more than three decades, could be related to the event which produced the strange morphology of the Sombrero galaxy which, if it was caused by a wet merger, would need the interaction of two galaxies with large masses.
The work has been possible thanks to the collaboration between professional and amateur astronomers. “We have collaborated with the Spanish astrophotographer Manuel Jiménez, who took the images with a robotic telescope of 18 centimetre diameter, and the well-known australian astrophotographer David Malin, who discovered this tidal stream on photographic plates taken in the 90’s of the last century. This collaboration shows the potential of amateur telescopes to take deep images of nearby galaxies which give important clues about the process of their assembly which is continuing until the present epoch,” concludes Martínez-Delgado.
