New research by American and Canadian scieists shows that the carbon in our bodies has left the galaxy and been transferred to the cosmic conveyor belt.
According to RCO News Agency, Life on Earth could not exist without carbon, but carbon itself cannot exist without stars. Almost all elemes, including carbon, oxygen, and iron—except hydrogen and helium—exist only because they were formed in stellar furnaces and ejected io the universe after the death of their stars. In a final act of galactic recycling, planets like ours form by incorporating star-forming atoms io their composition; Whether it is iron in the core of the earth, whether it is oxygen in its atmosphere or carbon in the bodies of earthlings.
According to Fiz, A group of American and Canadian scieists recely confirmed that carbon and other star-forming atoms aren’t just drifting through space to prepare for new uses. In galaxies like our own solar system, which are still actively forming new stars, these atoms take an orbital journey. They orbit their home galaxy in large streams that extend io iergalactic space.
These streams are like gia conveyor belts that push material out and back io the galaxy, where gravity and other forces can gather the raw material io planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and even new stars.
Samaha Garza, a doctoral stude at the University of Washington, said: Think of curres as a big train station that is constaly pushing materials out and pulling them in. The heavy elemes that make stars are pushed out of their host galaxy and after the death of their supernovas, they make their way to the surrounding environme of the galaxy to finally be pulled inward there and coinue the cycle of star and planet formation.
“Jessica Werk” (Jessica Werk), a professor at the University of Washington and head of the astronomy departme of this university, said: “The consequences of the evolution of galaxies and the nature of the carbon deposits in them is an exciting topic for the formation of new stars.” The carbon in our bodies has likely spe a significa amou of time outside the galaxy.
In 2011, a group of scieists first confirmed the theory that star-forming galaxies like ours are surrounded by a galactic circumstellar medium, a large cloud of circulating material consisting of hot, oxygen-enriched gas. Garza, Work, and their colleagues found that the galactic environme of star-forming galaxies also circulates lower-temperature materials such as carbon.
“We can now confirm that the galactic environme acts like a gia reservoir for carbon and oxygen, and at least for star-forming galaxies, we can say that this material is re-eering the galaxy to coinue the recycling process,” Garza said.
Studying the galactic environme can help scieists understand how this recycling process, which eveually happens to all galaxies—even our own—winds down. One theory is that the reduced coribution of the galactic medium to the recycling process may explain why the stellar population of a galaxy declines over long periods of time.
If the cycle coinues—material is pushed out and pulled in again—there is theoretically enough fuel to coinue the star formation process, Garza said.
In this project, the researchers used the “Cosmic Origin Spectrograph” in the “Hubble Space Telescope”. The spectrograph showed how the light from nine dista quasars, which are the universe’s extremely bright light sources, is affected by the galactic surroundings of 11 star-forming galaxies.
The Hubble data showed that some of the quasars’ light is absorbed by a specific compone in the galactic medium. This particular compone is a large amou of carbon. In some cases, researchers have discovered carbon that extends almost 400,000 light-years io the iergalactic space.
Future research will focus on quaifying other elemes that make up the galactic environme and comparing the differences in their compositions between galaxies that are still forming large numbers of stars and galaxies that have largely stopped forming stars. Findings from these studies could shed light not only on when galaxies like ours migrate io star deserts, but also why.
This research was published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters”.
end of message
