01-05-2025
YSU professor captures rare discovery on galaxies
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) — A Youngstown State University professor is looking to the skies to help discover the building blocks of galaxies.
Dr. Patrick Durrell is part of an international team of astronomers who used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture a rare discovery.
For decades, Dr. Durrell has been asking himself the question, 'What makes galaxies tick?' As an astronomer regularly working with the Hubble Space Telescope, he's helping find the answer.
In his small office inside the Ward Beecher Planetarium, he showed off his team's latest research on the far reaches of the universe.
'We thought, 'Oh, maybe we're seeing, you know, the merging of star clusters.''
The galaxies might not look like a big deal because they are dim, but they hold a big secret.
'They're still very important. You know, numerically, these are the most populous galaxies out there,' Dr. Durrell said.
The international team of researchers captured images of over 80 galaxies, getting a look at a rare process for how nuclear star clusters are formed. A long-held hypothesis is that smaller star clusters can move towards the center of a galaxy, pulling other stars and clusters into their orbit, creating the nuclear cluster — something that's been difficult to prove until now.
'It's really hard to catch in the act and it looks like we found five galaxies where we are indeed catching it in the act. We're actually seeing this process in these high-resolution images from Hubble,' Durrell said. 'We're actually seeing this. We're not just saying theoretically this should happen.'
The main point of the original project, Durrell says, was to study star clusters in the galaxy, but discovering that they're actually merging together was an added bonus.
'It's kind of one of the fun things in science. It's not just discovery but you're kind of going, you know, what else is in the data? 'Oh, will ya look at that.''
Their latest research has been published in the scientific journal 'Nature.' Durrell has been working with the international team for over a decade. He helped coordinate capturing the Hubble images for this project and he has several more going on this summer.
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