Galaxies seen stripping themselves of gas

Galactic winds from intense star formation in giant galaxies may blow gas right out of those galaxies, shutting down further star-making, U.S. astronomers say. A team of researches analyzing telescope images and data said they found 29 galaxies with winds flowing out of them at up to 1,500 miles per second, an order of magnitude faster than most observed galactic winds. "They're nearly blowing themselves apart," study leader Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic at the University of California's Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution said. "Most galactic winds are more like fountains; the outflowing gas will fall back onto the galaxies. With the high-velocity winds we've observed, the outflowing gas will escape the galaxy and never return." The young, massive galaxies observed are in the midst of or just completing a period of star formation as intense as anyone has ever observed, astronomers said. "These galactic-scale crazy-fast winds are probably driven by the really massive stars exploding and pushing out the gas around them," co-author Alison Coil of UC San Diego's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences said. "There's just such a high density of those stars it's like all these bombs went off near each other at the same time. Each bomb evacuates the area around it, then the next can push gas out further until they're evacuating gas on the scale of the whole galaxy," she said in a UC Davis release Monday.