Jul 19, 2022
Astronomers find surprisingly complex magnetic fields in a galaxy’s halo
Posted by Shubham Ghosh Roy in categories: evolution, space
Astronomers hope to explain how galaxies like this one can grow magnetic fields that stretch for thousands of light-years — and what affect they have on galactic evolution.
The finding came out of a project to study radio signals from spiral galaxies that are tilted so we see them edge-on from Earth’s point of view. For these galaxies, astronomers can more easily separate what’s happening outside of the galaxies’ disks, in the gas-filled “haloes” that surround them.
Using observations from a radio telescope in New Mexico called the Very Large Array, the astronomers measured properties of the radio emission coming from the halo of the galaxy NGC 4631. They’d known from past observations that there were large-scale magnetic fields that extended out of the disk into the halo of this galaxy.
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