NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of NASA captured an image which looked like a string of pearls orbiting two cores of spiral galaxies.
The unusual formation was seen at a distance of 100,000 light years away. The newly-discovered star spiral may provide data on how superclusters were formed after two galaxies merged. Researchers were thrilled to witness the gas dynamics in such phenomenon as it is a rare process.
The formation occurred between a pair of elliptical galaxies located in a galaxy cluster called SDSS J1531+3414. The powerful gravity emanating from the galaxy cluster showed an image of blue arcs and streaks.
At first, the researchers thought that the pearls were a product of a lensed image from a background galaxy, but further observations through the Nordic Optical Telescope located at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain proved that their assumption was wrong.
"We were surprised to find this stunning morphology. We've long known that the 'beads on a string' phenomenon is seen in the arms of spiral galaxies and in tidal bridges between interacting galaxies. However, this particular supercluster arrangement has never been seen before in giant merging elliptical galaxies," said Grant Tremblay of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, in a news release.
The physical process that produced the string of pearls transpired when the internal pressure of the gas cloud was insufficient to prevent the collapse of the area containing the matter. This process was similar to the process wherein a column of water hits a cloud and the water falls in drops instead in a continuous stream.
Scientists are currently analyzing how the star chain was formed. One theory that they formulated was that the cold molecular gas that fuels the star formation may have originated from the merging of the two galaxies. Another theory was a "cooling flow" situation, where the gas that came from the plasma cools down and forms pools of cold molecular gas. A third theory was that the cold gas originated from a high-temperature shock created after the galaxies merged.
