Quote:
Originally Posted by David Fitz-Henr
Great work Steven, really interesting stuff here! A lot of UV showing in and around the dust lanes, I guess showing star formation at the "shock front" of the colliding galaxies.
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Interesting idea, David.
The idea that the peculiarity of the dust lane is in part due to some sort of shock has not really been considered in the professional literature.
In general, the majority of the professional astronomers who have studied this galaxy tend to think of the dust lane as being the visual manifestation of a somewhat-settled disk structure that bisects the galaxy along its shortest axis.
(in "real 3-D space", NGC 5128 is a triaxial ellipsoid, which could be almost prolate in shape (in other words, it is slightly 'hot dog bun' shaped, in three dimensions), and the disk of gas/dust/stars that was the cannibalized galaxy occupies the shortest axis of the spheroid)
Shock waves tend to occur in those galaxy mergers where
both of the progenitor galaxies have a substantial Interstellar Medium..... so most of the people who have so far modelled the accretion of the small disk galaxy by the giant old spheroid of NGC5128 tend to (perhaps naively) think that because N5128 probably didn't have much of an ISM before the merger event, the role of shocks can be ignored.
cheers,
bad galaxyman
The observed dust lane in N5128 is thought to be due to a merger with a small, low mass, spiral galaxy. However, the kinematics and stellar ages of the primary spheroidal component indicate that
the entire structure of NGC 5128 originated in a very-large-scale galaxy merger event that occured
previous to the current instance of galaxy merger.