What did you get up to in school? Maybe you listened to The Killers, dared to run in the corridor or constantly debated skiving maths.
Julian Shapiro, however, was busy discovering three galaxies, all of which are a new type of galaxy altogether.
‘It was very exciting,’ Julian tells Metro, ‘though my excitement was drawn out over a long time as it took months to estimate their distances.’
Julian, now an undergraduate astrophysics student at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote about his findings in a paper this month.
The trio of cosmic neighbourhoods, published in the Astrophysical Journal, are even named after him: Shapiro Dwarf Galaxies I, II, and III.
They’re what scientists call ‘backsplash galaxies’, cosmic drifters that have had all their star-forming gases sucked up by larger galaxies.
The Shapiro Dwarf Galaxies are about 25million light-years away from Earth, or 1.400000e+14 miles, or one followed by 14 zeroes.
‘The backsplash candidates I discovered are dwarf galaxies, which are flung around much more easily, and each contains only a few hundred thousand stars compared to a few hundred billion in our galaxy,’ Julian says.
Three tiny galaxies could solve big puzzles, says astronomer
Backsplash galaxies have long been predicted but never definitively observed in the wild.
So between classes, Julian used archival telescope data to predict likely locations in the nearby universe.
The best contenders are dwarf galaxies, clusters of just a few hundred thousand stars. Tiny by galactic standards.
Sometimes they’re going starless as the larger galaxies they lurk near are stealing the gas they need to make new celestial bodies. Others are lone wolves, twinkling away with activity.
The three Julian spotted seem to be somewhere in between.
They’re gasless loners but are far away from their alleged cosmic gas thief, M101, a pinwheel-shaped galaxy made of one trillion stars.
Julian says M101 robbed the Shapiro Dwarf Galaxies of their star-making gas and chucked them aside, making them among the first resolved ‘backsplash galaxy’ candidates.
‘Their potential ejection history can help explain unexpected populations of dwarf galaxies that are isolated and not forming new stars,’ Julian adds.
If M101 is hurling around backsplash galaxies, it suggests that the spiral galaxy we call home, the Milky Way, could be doing the same.
The findings, which will require follow-up studies, have long been predicted by the standard model of cosmology, called Lambda-CDM.
According to the model, after the Big Bang, gravity crammed cosmic gas into stars and black holes, then dragged them together into galaxies.
For Julian, he’s come a long way since he was a high school student looking forward to his afternoon physics classes.
‘I have had an interest in astronomy since I was very young,’ he says.
‘But it largely emerged from the aesthetic beauty of our universe and images from the Hubble Telescope.’
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