Image courtesy of Illustris Collaboration/ESO
Can a
cosmic web strangle a galaxy? This seems to be the case with a distant galaxy.
The cosmic web is killing a galaxy. Galaxies can only
continue to form stars when they are full of gas, and one dwarf galaxy nearly
100 million light years away is being stripped of its stellar fuel by the
enormous web of matter that stretches throughout the universe.
One side of this galaxy, called AGC 727130, looks completely
normal. On the other side, though, the gas is stretched well beyond the
galaxy’s edge, pulled away by some unseen force. Nicholas Luber at
Columbia University in New York and his colleagues spotted this
disintegrating galaxy using the Very Large Array, a radio observatory in
New Mexico.
Leah Crane 2025