The research group of Associate Professor Rei Furuya of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Tokushima University and Professor Yoshiaki Taniguchi of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, The Open University of Japan is a molecule located about 5,000 light-years from the giant black hole, which is about 50 million light-years from the earth. We succeeded in investigating the properties of gas clouds for the first time in the world, and found that the star formation rate per unit mass is the same as that of molecular gas clouds observed in the past.
According to the University of Tokushima, this molecular gas cloud is located in the spiral galaxy NGC1068 in the direction of the constellation Whale.Its mass is about 20 times that of the Sun, and it actively produces stars.Observations with the giant radio telescope "ALMA" installed in the Atacama Desert in Chile, South America, show that the star generation rate per unit mass, which indicates how many stars are born in a molecular gas cloud in one year, is the past data. It was the same.
The star formation rate was discovered around 2012 by American astronomer Dr. Charles Lada and others.The molecular gas cloud of the Milky Way galaxy and the others had the same star formation rate per unit mass, but the masses of both had a difference of 6 digits or more.
The molecular gas cloud discovered this time has a mass just in the middle.It was confirmed that the mechanism of star formation in the molecular gas cloud is universal despite being affected by the gravitational field and electromagnetic waves of the supermassive black hole.
The research team sees this discovery as a crucial step in understanding the process by which stars and clusters are born.
Paper information: [Astronomical Society of Japan European Report] A Massive Dense Gas Cloud close to the Nucleus of the Seyfert Galaxy NGC 1068
