Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a giant and quiet galaxy called the Red Potato Galaxy. A paper on the discovery was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The research object using JWST and other devices is the gas-rich node of the MQN01 space network. Typically, such protoclusters and nodes at high redshift contain large reserves of cold gases and molecules. Therefore, it is believed that it is in such structures that the formation of giant galaxies through gas accretion takes place especially effectively.
“In this paper, we present the discovery of an extinct giant galaxy in the gas-rich environment of a cosmic web node, or protocluster, at z∼3.2, identified and confirmed spectroscopically by the JWST program,” the paper said.
The red potato, or MQN01 J004131.9-493704, has a half-luminosity radius of about 3,260 light-years and a stellar mass of 110 billion solar masses. The mass of molecular gas in the galaxy is less than 7 billion suns.
The absence of carbon monoxide and sodium D lines in the spectrum indicates that “Red Potatoes” are poor in both molecular and neutral gases. Furthermore, no gas streams were detected in the galaxy. In general, according to the kinematics of ionized gas, chaotic motion of stars prevails in this system.
The star formation rate in the Red Potato is an order of magnitude lower than the main sequence of star-forming galaxies – no more than 4.0 solar masses per year. This is quite strange, since it is located at the center of a large reservoir of cold circumgalactic environment.
Red Potato's stellar velocity dispersion is 268 km/s, indicating increased turbulence in its vicinity. The researchers suggest that this is the result of the influence of a bright active galactic nucleus nearby (about 48 kpc) – which appears to be “attacking” its quiet neighbor with an expanding X-ray beam.
They concluded that even in the dense, gas-rich environment of the early Universe, star formation in galaxies could be inhibited by external influences.
