It has long been suspected that galaxies grow by pulling in material from their surroundings, but this process has proved very difficult to observe directly. Now astronomers have found the best direct observational evidence so far to support the theory.
The European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope was used to study a rare alignment between a distant galaxy and an even more distant quasar, the extremely bright centre of a galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole.
Galaxies deplete their reservoirs of gas as they create new stars, and must somehow be continuously replenished with fresh gas. Astronomers suspected that a galaxy drags gas inwards, which then circles around the galaxy, rotating with it before falling in. Although some evidence of such accretion had been observed in galaxies before, the motion of the gas and its other properties had not been fully explored up to now. The new observations revealed how the galaxy was rotating, and the composition and motion of the gas outside the galaxy.
By: Jenny Winder, SEN.com, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
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via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/08/feeding-galaxy-observed
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