The Universe’s Brightest Galaxy Is Eating Its Neighbors
Galaxy W2246-0526 has been discovered in 2015. It is the largest, most massive and brightest galaxy in the known universe. And now we know it is because it is eating its smaller neighbors.
We observe the galaxy in a very far a way young universe as the radiation from it is traveling for about 12.4 billion years. We do know of a number of galaxies so far away but this one was special. From what we know this is the largest, most massive and brightest galaxy in the known universe. It gives out 350 trillion times more infrared radiation than our Sun.
But the brightness of the galaxy isn’t caused by its stars but by its fantastically powerful core made from a disk of extremely hot matter around a supermassive black hole – a quasar. Quasars that intensively shine in the infrared are called Hot, Dust-Obscured Galaxies – sometimes shortened to Hot DOG – making W2246-0526 the hottest known Hot DOG ever.
An astronomer Tanio Díaz-Santos and his team from the Chilean Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago recently observed this space behemoth using the Atacama Large Milimeter/submilimeter Array (ALMA). And they found gigantic streams of matter that are flowing from the three nearby galaxies into W2246-0526.
In the end, it was shown that these streams have enough matter that it could equal to galaxies themselves. But – galactic cannibalism isn’t that rare. But with W2246-0526 we have the earliest proof of galactic cannibalism and our first image of a giant galaxy “feeding” on several smaller galaxies in the such a young universe.
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