The Sculptor Galaxy could show astronomers the process that adds the burst to starburst galaxies. This family of stars, known to researchers as NGC 253, is one of the closest starburst galaxies to our own Milky Way. This highly-active galaxy lies roughly 11 million light years from the Earth.
Starburst galaxies produce stars at an incredible rate - up to 1,000 times faster than a family of stars such as the Milky Way.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma) in Chile was used to image stellar nurseries at the heart of the Sculptor Galaxy.
"All stars form in dense clouds of dust and gas. Until now, however, scientists struggled to see exactly what was going on inside starburst galaxies that distinguished them from other star-forming regions," Adam Leroy from Ohio State University (OSU) said.
The Alma observatory was designed to resolve these individual star-forming foundations.
A cloud of carbon monoxide, similar to that produced by automobiles, was found to surround the region where stars are being born. Astronomers measured concentrations of around 40 different components, in 10 regions, within the formation. Differing compositions were found to mark regions of specific densities.
This property allowed astronomers to piece together how the galaxy is constructed, and the conditions responsible for highly-active stellar formation. The areas which showed the greatest rate of stellar birth were found to be 10 times denser, and far more turbulent, than similar clouds in the Milky Way.
The density in these regions could be responsible for the high birthrate for stars in this class of galaxies, researchers believe. This would suggest star burst galaxies differ from other families of stars not just in the number of stellar nurseries they contain, but also their density and chemical makeup.
"There is a class of galaxies and parts of galaxies, we call them starbursts, where we know that gas is just plain better at forming stars. To understand why, we took one of the nearest such regions and pulled it apart - layer by layer - to see what makes the gas in these places so much more efficient at star formation," Leroy said.
The Sculptor Galaxy is a disk-shaped family of stars, discovered by astronomer Caroline Herschel in 1783, while she searched for comets. The Hubble Space Telescope focused in on this body in a 1998 image.
Starburst galaxies are usually accompanied by long filaments of gas, radiating from their core.
Mysteries surronding the evolution of galaxies could be answered, if astronomers piece together what makes these staarburst formation produce such a large number of new stars. Researchers now want to examine these areas, in order to determine of the stars being produced in starburst regions differ significantly from stellar bodies produced in other types of galaxies.
