This nearby galaxy has powerful winds blowing in opposite directions from its center

A new study has found that NGC 253, a spiral galaxy located 11.4 million light-years from Earth, has powerful winds blowing in opposite directions from its center.

This galactic wind is composed of gas with temperatures of millions of degrees that glows in X-rays and was detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory,

This composite image includes Chandra data (pink and white), visible light data (cyan) and emission from hydrogen (orange), both from a 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak Observatory and infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (red).

A new study shows young stars in NGC 253 are sending material enriched with elements across hundreds of light-years of space. These elements, including many responsible for life on Earth, are then folded into new generations of stars & planets: https://t.co/WyUOhcp7v8 pic.twitter.com/GLDe4Conar

— Chandra Observatory (@chandraxray) March 29, 2023

Led by Sebastian Lopez of The Ohio State University, the team used deep Chandra observations to study the properties of the galactic wind and found that the gas densities and temperatures within the galactic wind are the highest in regions less than about 800 light-years from the center of the galaxy and subsequently decline as the distance from the center increases.

The findings contradict an earlier model proposing that winds emanating from starburst galaxies like NGC 253 were spherical in shape. The recent theoretical work instead suggests that a more focused wind is formed by a ring of "super star clusters" positioned near the galaxy's center. These clusters comprise a significant number of young, massive stars.

In addition to the density and temperature of the galactic wind, Lopez and his team analyzed the wind's composition by examining the dispersion of elements such as oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, and iron throughout the structure, revealing that these elements become progressively more dispersed as the distance from the galaxy's center increases.

Their findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.