Galaxies avoid an early death because they have a ‘heart and lungs’ which effectively regulate their ‘breathing’ and prevent them growing out of control, a new study by Kent astrophysicists suggests.
If they didn’t, the Universe would have aged much faster than it has and all we would see today is huge ‘zombie’ galaxies teeming with dead and dying stars.
That’s according to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, which investigates one of the great mysteries of the Universe – why galaxies are not as large as astronomers would expect.
Something appears to be stifling their enormous potential by limiting the amount of gas they absorb to convert into stars, meaning that instead of endlessly growing, something inside resists what was thought to be the inevitable pull of gravity. Carl Richards and Professor Michael Smith, who led the research at Kent, suggest that this resistance could in fact be the galaxies controlling the rate at which they grow through how they ‘breathe’.