What’s the most lonely place you can imagine right now?
An abandoned building?
A deserted island?
A cat at a dog show?
Well yeah, but let’s ramp up the scale beyond the skies and look at the loneliest places
in the Universe – the Void Galaxies.
It appears that astronomers may have just found the most solitary of them all.
The Void Galaxy.
Sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, right?
But, that name suggests only the strangest placement of such galaxies.
They’re alone and surrounded by enormous volumes of absolutely nothing.
Just a dark void, with no stars, no planets, no matter at all.
SO it doesn’t matter – ha!
Forgive me.
You may argue that everything in the Universe, like for example our own solar system, is
surrounded by vast expanses of dark space, consisting of almost nothing, but I’m talking
about a whole other level of “nothing” here.
I’m talking about things like the Boötes void, which is nearly 330 million light-years
in diameter!
That’s like 132 times the distance between us and our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda
galaxy.
And it has little to no matter in it!
Even if mysterious dark matter was there, which we can’t see, it would emit radiation.
And there’s almost no radiation coming from great voids.
But in this “almost nothingness” of great voids “almost” is the key word.
They still contain matter, just a lot less than anywhere else.
The Boötes void, or as it’s also called: The Great Nothing, was proved to have about
60 galaxies.
And that’s only the assumed number.
Some estimations propose that The Great Nothing must have at least 2,000 galaxies in it.
But 2,000 galaxies in a space as big as the Boötes void is close to nothing at all.
That’s nowhere near what we consider normal for most other places in the Universe.
Even finding those void galaxies is extremely tough.
But we surely shouldn’t complain – our skies are rich, filled not only with the light
of stars from our own galaxy, but also with light from other galaxies around us.
We found out a long time ago that our galaxy isn’t the only one.
Even in the time of ancient Greece.
One particularly interesting part of Hercules’ legend may be a testament to that.
In this legend, Zeus laid his son Hercules next to sleeping Hera, so Hercules could drink
her milk and become immortal.
Hera woke up and pushed Hercules away, and some of the milk he was drinking spilled and
became a slightly fainted band of light in the skies.
This band of light is the galaxy.
Even the word itself roughly translates as “milky one”.
But to be fair, this murky light was just coming from a visible part of our own galaxy.
The first scientific observation of another galaxy is of the Andromeda galaxy, and it
was made by the Persian astronomer Al-Sufi in the 10th century.
He noted Andromeda as a “small cloud” and later similarly described another galaxy,
that would one day be known to us as the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Today we’re able to conclude that there are more than 2 trillion galaxies in the observable
universe.
And they’re collected in even more massive structures known as clusters and superclusters,
which in their turn form galaxy filaments.
This natural tendency of galaxies to group into organized megastructures is exactly the
reason why we see voids between filaments.
And it seems like some unique galaxies were late to the universal party and formed in
voids from the leftover gas that was still there.
One of these lonely galaxies is the newly found MCG+01-02-015.
It’s situated deep in the void.
Just try to imagine, if we lived at this distance from any other galaxy, we wouldn’t have
known that there’s another galaxy in the Universe until 1960.
That’s how long it would take the light from another galaxy to reach this lonely place,
situated in the great cosmic void.
Until that time, anything outside of it would be invisible, as if it didn’t exist at all.
This newly found galaxy found itself in a strange position because of the Universal
expansion after the Big Bang.
You see, the presumable cause of the existence of the Universe wasn’t a homogenous process,
and so inconsistencies in it led to the formation of voids and galactic filaments.
Even if you light a match, at the very first moment you can see how a chemical reaction
produces a force that pushes matter outward from the match itself, like a micro-explosion.
But this force doesn’t push in every direction equally; in some places it’s stronger than
others.
Once again, it’s a matter of scale, and the Big Bang was huge.
At that time, all the matter in the Universe was concentrated in a tiny space.
And then it exploded, pushing all that matter in all directions.
We observe the results of this explosion to this very day in the expansion of the Universe.
The further the matter goes from the initial explosion, the more the distance between different
parts of this matter.
This means that even the tiniest fluctuation in the process of the Big Bang could possibly
become the birthplace of the hugest space void of our days.
Combine it with the magnetic nature of all matter, pulling all of it together, and you
have a picture of the Universe we observe today.
Galaxies collected into clusters and filaments that are separated from each other by vast
volumes of a pure void.
Void Galaxies may be the strangest type of galaxies in terms of their origin, but in
the vast space of the Universe, there are a lot of other galactic scale miracles.
For example, there’s one galaxy called the Sombrero Galaxy.
It’s not hard to guess why.
This lenticular galaxy from the constellation of Virgo is 31 million light-years away from
us, and it’s only 30% the size of the Milky Way.
It has a huge bulge right in the center of it.
This bulge is formed by the effect of a super-massive black hole, located in the nucleus of the
Galaxy.
It also collected all the hydrogen gas and ice in the so-called dust lane, which encircles
the central bulge.
The combination of this dust ring on the edge and the bulge in the center provided this
galaxy with its funny name.
There are also galaxies that are interesting because of their rapid star generation and
supernova explosions.
This makes galaxies look stunning, bursting with colors of all kind.
The most notable of those is the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy.
It looks like an enormous whirlpool of pink, blue and white.
There are about 8 active supernovas in this galaxy, and the pink color highly suggests
the constant formation of newborn stars.
If our galaxy is milky, then this one certainly dropped some strawberries in the mix.
Another wonder of the Universe takes the form not just of one galaxy, but of two that collide
with each other.
There’s the Tadpole Galaxy that has a large visible tail which formed when a larger galaxy
literally merged with a smaller one.
Or Antennae Galaxies, that have been colliding with each other for about 600 million years
now.
About half of that time, merging galaxies shoot out stars and clouds of dust pushed
by gravitational forces, and these stars form something that looks like the antennas of
an insect.
Another example of a galactic crush is the Porpoise Galaxy that looks like a dolphin!
What looks like the shining eye of this “dolphin” is, in fact, the core of the galaxy.
But, the process we’re looking at is quite brutal.
Two galaxies colliding with each other, while one of them appears to be much denser and
has a huge gravitational force at its disposal.
With this immense power, it shatters and bends another galaxy.
Knowing this, it’s easy to imagine how the shape of this galaxy has changed.
These types of strange galaxies are especially intriguing because we know that our own galaxy,
the Milky Way, is going to collide with the Andromeda galaxy one day.
Don’t panic!
This won’t happen for another 4.5 billion years.
Let’s cross our fingers that at that point, we’ll still be around to watch the show
from a safe distance on some other cool planet.
Presumably, every star affected by this process will be too far away from another, so they
won’t collide.
But gravitational forces will be huge, and some stars will be pulled out of the new resulting
galaxy, that’s already nicknamed Milkdromeda.
Wow, Milkdromeda – gee, that sounds kind of like a new brand of cookie!
There’s no way to count all the wonders that we may eventually find in the Universe.
From galaxies in the middle of nowhere, to galaxies that can’t evenly share space between
each other and start to fight for it!
What type of galaxies do you find the least probable and the most amusing?
Let me know down in the comments!
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