Researchers have observed ten times as many super bright galaxies as theoretical models should allow.
Ten times as many super bright galaxies have been observed than theory predicts
For years and years, research has been conducted into galaxies that can contain many hundreds of thousands of billions of stars. Many questions remain about how these systems form.
Thanks to infrared telescopes, researchers have already discovered that hyperluminous galaxies also exist. These are galaxy with a brightness of ten trillion suns. In fact, it seemed that there were more such galaxies than theoretical models could explain. But was this observation correct?
To find out, a better picture was needed. A large team of researchers turned to LOFAR: a Dutch radio telescope composed of thousands of radio antennas. With this enormous radio telescope it was possible to look much deeper with a much sharper image. For up to ten years, the researchers collected data and viewed individual super-bright galaxies.
Was the theory wrong?
All that data eventually yielded the answer they were looking for: yes, there are indeed more such galaxies than theoretically possible. About ten times as much. Well, the brightness of these galaxies would come from a lot of star formation. As many as 10,000 new stars would be formed per year (by comparison, our own Milky Way Galaxy only forms one per year), but even then, stars could never be solely responsible for the number of super bright galaxies now found.
What is the source then? That is something they want to look at in the near future. To this end, the team will conduct follow-up observations at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
In this audio you hear Huub Röttgering, researcher and director of the Leiden Observatory. Read more about the research here: Ten times more hyperluminous galaxies have been observed than stars can produce. You can find the paper here: The bright end of the infrared luminosity functions and the abundance of hyperluminous infrared galaxies.
