Researchers have found, that heavy winds in outer space galaxies are causing heavy elements such as oxygen, carbon, and iron to travel into halos at a million light years distance. The investigation team is calling this phenomenon space “wastefulness.”

A team composed of researchers from the United States University of Colorado and Europe has found that there is a greater amount of these heavy elements surrounding galaxies that in the galaxies themselves.

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‘Wasteful’ galaxies launch heavy elements into surrounding halos and deep space. Image courtesy of Reddit

Since the beginning of space exploration, researchers have tried to understand or estimate the number of galaxies that exist in outer space, NASA even created the Hubble Space Telescope to learn how many galaxies are there in space, yet this has been a tough job.

A range of 100 to 200 billion galaxies has been estimated by the Space Telescope Science Institute, yet Hubble’s telescope technology is increasingly trying to understand better deep space mysteries.

Galaxies are gravitational systems formed by stars, stellar, dust, interstellar gas, and planets. There are all sorts of galaxies within the deep space, from the so-called dwarfs galaxies that only have a few thousand stars to those who have trillion stars in them.

There are three types of galaxies, according to specialists on the matter, which are elliptical, spiral and irregular and the vast majority of them have a black hole in their center.

A characteristic element in galaxies is also the gassy cloud that surrounds them. Researchers have been investigating this matter for years. Giving this element the name of The Circumgalactic Medium, which is thought to throw heavy elements in and out of the galaxy.

Further investigations on galaxies discovered that the circumgalactic medium has a massive reach since it can extend for a million light-years. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, stretches around 100,000 million years.

Wastefulness in space

The team of researchers led by Benjamin Oppenheimer from the University of Colorado sought to understand the components of the circumgalactic medium and thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the team was able to make their discovery.

The Cosmic Origin Spectrograph (COS) was the element in NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope that helped the team obtain the necessary data to evaluate the inside of the circumgalactic medium and perform simulations.

Researchers modeled all sorts of elliptical, spiral and irregular galaxies, with different characteristics in all of them, including Earth’s galaxy the Milky Way.  The research team discovered that in all of the galaxies, the circumgalactic medium was filled with heavy elements.

“The remarkable similarity of the galaxies in our simulations to those targeted by the COS team enables us to interpret the observations with greater confidence,” said co-author of the study Robert Crain, who is also a part of the Royal Society University Research, which is the journal that published the study.

Before this investigation, it was thought that heavy elements disposed of by planets and stars were used or recycled to create new stars but according to the leading researcher Benjamin Oppenheimer, “ As it turns out, galaxies aren’t very good at recycling,”

Oxygen in different galaxies

Modeling various types of galaxies also led the team to understand why is there a lack of oxygen in elliptical galaxies when compared to spiral galaxies.  Researchers discovered that in elliptical galaxies have a “hotter” circumgalactic medium with temperatures that passed one million Kelvin degrees.

Spiral galaxies, in the other hand, have temperatures around 300,000 Kelvin degrees, meaning it’s fifty times hotter than the temperature of the sun. The process of populating a galaxy with heavy elements takes around billion years, a significant amount of energy from supermassive black holes and other means, experts estimate.

This discovery led the team to understand that the heavy elements located in the Milky Way have been there since before the sun was born.

This discovery, in some way, frustrates the human attempt to understand the universe, galaxies, and planets.

Constant space investigation has proven that understanding galaxies, is becoming more though as Earth years pass, according to the website Space.com, modern day technology is constantly creating new tools to understand outer space. But the universe keeps growing apart from our home planet, complicating his view through telescopes.

Recent investigations have understood that the universe’s speed has improved, and it is expanding in a rapid way, even faster than the speed of light, and it’s expanding in a more accelerated way.

“We can only see light from galaxies whose light had enough time to reach us. It doesn’t mean that that’s all there is in the universe. Hence, the definition of the observable universe” Said Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute to Space.com

Several theories have kept on emerging between researchers, astronomers and scientists to reach conclusions about deep space, it is yet to see what modern, and future technology will provide to humankind.

Source: Cosmos Magazine