In January of 2019, astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii and the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy’s ATLAS twin telescopes, reported evidence of the exact moment a star collapsed to form a compact object, such as a black hole or neutron star. They dubbed the object “The Cow”, shown in the image above, just visible as one of two bright spots in the lower right quadrant of the spiral galaxy classified as CGCG 137-068. The objects incredibly bright glow –10 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova–was caused by stellar debris, swirling around its event horizon.
ESA scientists observe that it cannot be proven whether the particular cloud of dust and gas that gave birth to our Sun collapsed as a result of the collision with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, discovered in the 1990s to be orbiting our galactic home. It seems possible, they conjecture, that without the dwarf galaxy crossing paths with the Milky Way, Earth and life on it may not have been born.
“It is a very curious object that we’ve never seen before. It looks strange and familiar at the same time,” said Dr. Tiantian Yuan, from Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3-D) about image of an extremely rare type of galaxy, R5519,—described as a “cosmic ring of fire”—as it existed 11 billion years ago with a massive hole at its center with a diameter two billion times longer than the distance between the Earth and the Sun or three million times bigger than the diameter of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, which in 2019 became the first ever to be directly imaged. “It is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way,” added Yuan.
The sublime beauty and the danger of physics is that sometimes things exist that we can never see. Which led scientists to ask: Was an unknown object, perhaps a cosmic string, weird one-dimensional defects in space-time that should be out there, somewhere, detected at the Milky Way’s galactic center in 2016? If yes, it could have profound implications for understanding gravity, space-time and the universe itself.
“These objects look like gas and behave like stars,” said co-author Andrea Ghez, UCLA’s Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics and director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group about a new class of bizarre objects with orbits ranging from about 100 to 1,000 years at the center of our galaxy, not far from the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* that look compact most of the time and stretch out when their orbits bring them closest to the black hole.
