Hubble Reveals Cosmic Bullet That Gave The Bullseye Galaxy Its Record-Breaking Rings
There, astronomers have found a galaxy girdled by, not one, but nine concentric rings – the aftermath of a violent encounter with a blue dwarf galaxy that shot right through its heart, sending shockwaves rippling out into space.
Officially named LEDA 1313424, this galaxy has been given the appropriate title of the Bullseye Galaxy, and its serendipitous discovery is a new window into galaxy-on-galaxy crime.
"We're catching the Bullseye at a very special moment in time," says astronomer Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University. "There's a very narrow window after the impact when a galaxy like this would have so many rings."
So-called ring galaxies are extremely rare in the Universe, and they are thought to be the result of a very specific set of circumstances. Although space is mostly empty, galaxies are drawn together along filaments of the cosmic web, resulting in more collisions between them than you might expect.
Interactions between galaxies can take many forms, and produce varied results. Ring galaxies – such as the mysterious and famous Hoag's Object – are thought to be the result of a collision in which one galaxy blasts straight through the center of another.
The Bullseye Galaxy has confirmed that this process does indeed take place.
Not far from the larger galaxy is a smaller one, seen in visible light images using the Hubble Space Telescope. Observations taken using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI), which is optimized for visible blue wavelengths, revealed that this smaller galaxy is not only close to Bullseye, at a distance of just 130,000 kilometers (about 80,000 miles), but linked.
"KCWI provided the critical view of this companion galaxy that we see in projection near the bullseye," says astronomer Imad Pasha of Yale University.
"We found a clear signature of gas extending between the two systems, which allowed us to confirm that this galaxy is in fact the one that flew through the center and produced these rings."
"The data from KCWI that identified the 'dart' or impactor is unique. There hasn't been any other case where you can so clearly see the gas streaming from one galaxy to the other, " van Dokkum adds.
"That there is all this gas right between the velocity of one galaxy and the other is the key insight, showing that material is being pulled out of one galaxy, left behind by the other, or both. It physically fills up the entire space. The KCWI data enables us to see the tendril of gas that is still connecting these two galaxies."
The rings are regions of higher density, where the galactic material has been pushed together by the rippling shocks. The clumping of the dust and gas triggers star formation, resulting in higher star density, which is why the rings glitter so brightly.
The most distant ring is relatively faint and tenuous, and was only spotted in the KCWI images, at quite a distance from the main body of the galaxy. The entire galaxy is 250,000 light-years across.
That gap between the rings is a marvel, showing that the rings propagate outwards in almost exactly the same way as predicted by theory, with the first two rings spreading quickly, with the subsequent rings forming later.
It's like dropping a pebble in a pond.
"If we were to look down at the galaxy directly, the rings would look circular, with rings bunched up at the center and gradually becoming more spaced out the farther out they are," Pasha says.
The data provided by this marvelous galaxy will help astronomers adjust their models and theories, to better understand how such collisions play out. The researchers also hope future observations with upcoming telescopes will ferret out even more ring galaxies, lurking out there in the wide expanses of the cosmos.
The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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But initially, even he was daunted by the geometric side. 'To tell the truth,' Scholze says, 'until around 2014, the geometric Langlands programme looked incomprehensible to me.' That changed when Laurent Fargues at the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris proposed a reimagining of the local arithmetic Langlands conjectures in geometrical terms. Working together, Scholze and Fargues spent seven years showing that this strategy could help to make progress on proving a version of the local arithmetic Langlands conjecture concerning the p -adic numbers, which involve the primes and their powers. They connected it to the global geometric version that the team led by Gaitsgory and Raskin later proved. The papers by Scholze and Fargues built what Scholze describes as a 'wormhole' between the two areas, allowing methods and structures from the global geometric Langlands programme to be imported into the local arithmetic context. 'So I'm really happy about the proof,' Scholze says. 'I think it's a tremendous achievement and am mining it for parts.' Quantum connection According to some researchers, one of the most surprising bridges that the geometric Langlands programme has built is to theoretical physics. Since the 1970s, physicists have explored a quantum analogue of a classical symmetry: that swapping electric and magnetic fields in Maxwell's equations, which describe how the two fields interact, leaves the equations unchanged. This elegant symmetry underpins a broader idea in quantum field theory, known as S-duality. In 2007, Edward Witten at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, and Anton Kapustin at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena were able to show that S-duality in certain four-dimensional gauge theories — a class of theories that includes the standard model of particle physics — possesses the same symmetry that appears in the geometric Langlands correspondence. 'Seemingly esoteric notions of the geometric Langlands program,' the pair wrote, 'arise naturally from the physics.' Although their theories include hypothetical particles, called superpartners, that have never been observed, their insight suggests that geometric Langlands is not just a rarefied idea in pure mathematics; instead, it can be seen as a shadow of a deep symmetry in quantum physics. 'I do think it is fascinating that the Langlands programme has this counterpart in quantum field theory,' says Witten. 'And I think this might eventually be important in the mathematical development of the Langlands programme.' Among the first to take that possibility seriously was Minhyong Kim, director of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh, UK. 'Even simple-sounding problems in number theory — like Fermat's last theorem — are hard,' he says. One way to make headway is by using ideas from physics, like those in Witten and Kapustin's work, as a sort of metaphor for number-theoretic problems, such as the arithmetic Langlands conjecture. Kim is working on making these metaphors more rigorous. 'I take various constructions in quantum field theory and try to cook up precise number-theoretic analogues,' he says. Ben-Zvi, together with Yiannis Sakellaridis at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and Akshay Venkatesh at the IAS, is similarly seeking inspiration from theoretical physics, with a sweeping project that seeks to reimagine the whole Langlands programme from the perspective of gauge theory. Witten and Kapustin studied two gauge theories connected by S-duality, meaning that, although they look very different mathematically, the theories are equivalent descriptions of reality. Building on this, Ben-Zvi and his colleagues are investigating how charged materials behave in each theory, translating their dual descriptions into a network of interlinked mathematical conjectures. 'Their work really stimulated a lot of research, especially in the number-theory world,' says Raskin. 'There's a lot of people who are working in that circle of ideas now.' One of their most striking results concerns a two-way relationship between quite different mathematical objects called periods and L -functions. (The Riemann hypothesis, considered perhaps the most important unsolved problem in mathematics, is focused on the behaviour of a type of L -function.) Periods are a part of harmonic analysis, whereas L -functions are from the realm of number theory — the two sides of Langlands' original conjectures. However, through the lens of physics, Ben-Zvi and his colleagues showed that the relationship between periods and L -functions also mirrors that of the geometric programme. Hunting deeper truth Many mathematicians are confident that the proof of the geometric conjecture will stand, but it will take years to peer review the papers setting it out, which have all been submitted to journals. Gaitsgory, however, is already pushing forward on several fronts. For instance, the existing proof addresses the 'unramified' case, in which the terrain around points on the Riemann surface is well behaved. Gaitsgory and his collaborators are now hoping to extend their results to the more intricate, ramified case by accounting for more-complex behaviour around points as well as for singularities or 'punctures' in the surface. To that end, they are extending their work to the local geometric Langlands conjecture to understand in more detail what happens around a single point — and collaborating with, among others, Jessica Fintzen at the University of Bonn. 'This result opens the door to a whole new range of investigations — and that's where our interests start to converge, even though we come from very different worlds,' she says. 'Now they're looking to generalize the proof, and that's what's drawing me deeper into the geometric Langlands. Somehow, the proof's the beginning and not the end.' Fintzen studies the representations of p -adic groups — groups of matrices where the entries are p -adic numbers. She constructs the matrices explicitly — essentially, deriving a recipe for writing them down — and this seems to be the kind of local information that must be incorporated into the global geometric case to ramify it, Gaitsgory says. What began as a set of deep conjectures linking abstract branches of mathematics has evolved into a thriving, multidisciplinary effort that stretches from the foundations of number theory to the edges of quantum physics. The Langlands correspondence might not yet be the grand unified theory of mathematics, but the proof of its geometric arm is a nexus of ideas that will probably shape the field for years to come. 'The Langlands correspondence points to much deeper structures in mathematics that we're only scratching the surface of,' says Frenkel. 'We don't really understand what they are. They're still behind the curtains.'
