Assam research scholar from Tezpur University, Anshuman Borgohain contributed to an international research that found that young stars are forming beyond the far-off Blue Compact Dwarf (BCD) galaxies, which are located between 1.5 and 3.9 billion light-years from Earth.
A multinational team of astronomers from India, the USA, and France jointly made the discovery, using the Ultra Violet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) onboard AstroSat, India’s first dedicated multi-wavelength space observatory.
“It is still unclear how dwarf galaxies of the past have evolved into the ones in the present day. Hence, capturing their assembly process over the cosmic ages is considered as one of the important links to complete the picture of galaxy formation and evolution,” said Borgohain.
He also praised the imaging capability of AstroSat/UVIT and added, “It is opening up promising avenues in the field of extragalactic astronomy.”
Anshuman is being co-supervised by Kanak Saha at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and Rupjyoti Gogoi at Tezpur University.
The study’s contributor, Bruce Elmegreen, a principal research staff member at IBM Research in the United States, said, “It has been a mystery how some small galaxies like these can have such active star formation.”
According to him, these results indicate that enormous outer clumps’ gravitational pull is causing the accreting gas on the outside to funnel further within.
