\u201cTo understand the galaxies, you have to understand the ecosystem that theyre in,\u201d says astronomer Molly Peeples of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.<\/p>\n
Yet this galactic atmosphere is so diffuse that its invisible \u2014 a liter of CGM contains just a single atom. It has taken almost 60 years and an upgrade to the Hubble Space Telescope just to begin probing distant CGMs and figuring out how their constant churning can make or break galaxies.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly recently have we been able to really, truly, observationally characterize the relationship between this gaseous cycle and the properties of the galaxy itself,\u201d Werk says.<\/p>\n
Armed with the first extragalactic census, astronomers are now piecing together how a CGM controls its galaxys life and death. And new theoretical studies hint that galaxies stars would be arranged very differently without a mediums frenetic flows. Plus, new observations show that some CGMs are surprisingly lumpy<\/a>. A better understanding of CGMs, enabled by new telescopes and computer simulations, could change how scientists think about everything from galaxy collisions to the origins of our own atoms.<\/p>\n \u201cThe CGM is the part of the iceberg thats under the water,\u201d says astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski of ETH Zurich, who studies the more conventional parts of galaxies. \u201cWe now have good measurements where were sure its important.\u201d<\/p>\n Researchers use a bright source of background light, like a quasar, to learn about a galaxys circumgalactic medium, a diffuse cloud of gas and metals (pink in the illustration) surrounding a galaxy. Gas is recycled between the galaxy and the CGM. <\/p>\n Sources: J. Tumlinson, M.S. Peeples and J.K. Werk\/<\/em>Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 2017; M.S. Peeples\/<\/em>Nature 2015<\/em><\/p>\n That 2009 Hubble telescope upgrade, which made the CGM census possible, almost didnt happen.<\/p>\n In a cosmic coincidence, the Hubble telescopes chief champions were also the first astronomers to figure out how to observe a galaxys CGM. Lyman Spitzer of Princeton University and John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and other astronomers noticed something strange after the 1963 discovery of quasars<\/a> (SN Online: 3\/21\/14<\/em>), bright beacons now known to be white-hot disks surrounding supermassive black holes in the centers of distant galaxies.<\/p>\n Everywhere astronomers looked, quasars spectra \u2014 the rainbow created when their light is spread out over all wavelengths \u2014 were notched with dark holes. Some wavelengths of light werent getting through.<\/p>\n In 1969, Spitzer and Bahcall realized what was going on: The missing light was absorbed by gas at the edges of galaxies, the same stuff that would later be called the CGM. Astronomers had been peering at quasars shining through CGMs like headlights through a fog.<\/p>\n Not much more could be done at the time, though. Earths atmosphere also absorbs light in those same wavelengths, making it difficult to tell which light-blocking atoms were in a galaxys CGM and which came from closer to home. Knowing that a CGM was there was one thing; taking its measurements would require something extra.<\/p>\n Spitzer and Bahcall knew what they needed: a space telescope that could observe from outside Earths atmosphere. The pair were two of the most vocal and consistent champions of the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990. Spitzers colleagues called him Hubbles \u201cintellectual and political father<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Bahcall never stopped advocating for Hubble. In February 2005, six months before his death at age 70 from a rare blood disorder, he cowrote an article in the Los Angeles Times<\/em> urging Congress to restore funding for a mission to fix some aging Hubble instruments<\/a>, which NASA had canceled after the 2003 Columbia<\/em> space shuttle disaster.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is at stake is not only a piece of stellar technology but our commitment to the most fundamental human quest: understanding the cosmos,\u201d Bahcall and colleagues wrote. \u201cHubbles most important discoveries could be in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n His plea was answered: The space shuttle Atlantis<\/em> brought astronauts to repair Hubble for the last time in May 2009<\/a> (SN Online: 5\/19\/09<\/em>). During the repair, the astronauts installed the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph<\/a>, which could pick up diffuse CGM gas with 30 times the sensitivity of any previous instrument. Although earlier spectrographs on Hubble had picked out CGMs a few quasar-beams at a time, the new device let astronomers search around dozens of galaxies, using the light of even dimmer quasars.<\/p>\n \u201cIt blew the field wide open,\u201d Werk says.<\/p>\n A team led by Jason Tumlinson of Baltimores Space Telescope Science Institute, Hubbles academic home, made a catalog of 44 galaxies with a quasar sitting behind them from Hubbles perspective. In a 2011 paper in Science<\/em>, the researchers reported that every time they looked within 490,000 light-years of a galaxy, they saw spectra dappled with blank spots from atoms absorbing light<\/a>. That meant that CGMs werent odd cloaks worn by just a few galaxies. They were everywhere.<\/p>\n Tumlinsons team spent the first few years after Hubbles upgrade like 19th century naturalists describing new species. The group measured the mass and the chemical makeup of the galaxies CGMs and found they were huge cisterns of heavy elements. CGMs contain 10 million times the mass of the sun in oxygen alone<\/a>. In many cases, the mass of a CGM is comparable to the mass of the entire visible part of its galaxy.<\/p>\n The finding offers an answer to a long-standing cosmic mystery: How do galaxies have enough star-forming fuel to keep going for billions of years? Galaxies build stars from collapsing clouds of cool gas at a constant rate; the Milky Way, for example, makes one to two solar masses worth of stars every year. But there isnt enough cool gas within the visible part of a galaxy, the disk containing its stars, to support observed rates of star formation.<\/p>\n \u201cWe think that gas probably comes from the CGM,\u201d Werk says. \u201cBut exactly how that gas is getting into galaxies, where it gets in, the timescale on which it gets in, are there things that prevent it from getting in? Those are big questions that keep us all awake at night.\u201d<\/p>\n Werk and Peeples realized that all that mass could help solve two other cosmic bookkeeping problems. All elements heavier than helium (which astronomers lump together as \u201cmetals\u201d) are forged by nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars. When stars use up their fuel and explode as supernovas, they scatter those metals around to be folded into the next generation of stars.<\/p>\n But if you add up all the metals in the stars, gas and dust in a given galaxys disk, its not enough to account for all the metals the galaxy has ever made. The mismatch gets even worse if you include the hydrogen, helium, electrons and protons \u2014 basically all the ordinary matter that should have collected in the galaxy since the Big Bang. Astronomers call all those bits baryons. Galaxies seem to be missing 70 to 95 percent of that stuff.<\/p>\n So Peeples and Werk led a comprehensive effort to tally all the ordinary matter<\/a> in about 40 galaxies observed with Hubbles new spectrometer<\/a>. The researchers published the results in two 2014 papers in the Astrophysical Journal.<\/em><\/p>\n At the time, Werk reported that at least half of galaxies missing ordinary matter can be accounted for in their CGMs. In a 2017 update, Werk and colleagues found that the mass of baryons just in the form of cool gas<\/a> in a galaxys CGM could be nearly 90 billion solar masses. \u201cObviously, this mass could resolve the galactic missing baryons problem,\u201d the team wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cIts a classic science story,\u201d Schawinski says. The researchers had a hypothesis about where the missing material should be and made predictions. The group made observations to test those predictions and found what it sought.<\/p>\n In a separate study, Peeples showed that although metals are born in galaxies starry disks, those metals dont stay there. Only 20 to 25 percent of the metals a galaxy has ever produced remains in the stars, gas and dust in the disk, where the metals can be incorporated into new stars and planets. The rest probably ends up in the CGM.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at all the metals the galaxies ever produced in their whole lifetime, more of them are outside the galaxy than are still inside the galaxy,\u201d Tumlinson says, \u201cwhich was a huge shock.\u201d<\/p>\n So how did the metals get into the CGM? Quasars spectra couldnt help with that question. Their light shows only a slice through a single galaxy at a single moment in time. But astronomers can track galaxies growth and development with computer simulations based on physical rules for how stars and gas behave.<\/p>\n This strategy revealed the churning, ever-changing nature of gas in galaxies CGMs. Simulations such as EAGLE, or Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments<\/a>, which is run out of Leiden University in the Netherlands, showed that metals can reach CGMs through stars violent lives: in powerful winds of radiation blowing away from massive young stars, and in the death throes of supernovas spraying metals far and wide.<\/p>\n Once the metals are in the CGM, though, they dont always stay put. In simulations, galaxies seem to use the same gas over and over again.<\/p>\n \u201cIts basically just gravity,\u201d Peeples says. \u201cThrow a baseball up, and itll come back to the ground.\u201d The same goes for gas flowing out of galaxies: Unless the gas travels fast enough to escape the galaxys gravity altogether, those atoms will eventually fall back into the disk \u2014 and form new stars.<\/p>\n Some simulations show discrete gas parcels making the trip from a galaxys disk out into the CGM and back again several times. Together, CGMs and their galaxies are giant recycling devices.<\/p>\n That means that the atoms that make up planets, plants and people may have taken several trips to circumgalactic space before becoming part of us. Over hundreds of millions of years, the atoms that eventually became part of you traveled hundreds of thousands of light-years.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is my favorite thing,\u201d Tumlinson says. \u201cAt some point, your carbon, your oxygen, your nitrogen, your iron was out in intergalactic space.\u201d<\/p>\n But not all galaxies get their CGM gas back. Losing the gas could shut off star formation in a galaxy for good. No one knows how star formation shuts off, or quenches. But the answer is probably in the CGM.<\/p>\n Galaxies come in two main forms<\/a>: young spiral galaxies that are making stars and old blobby galaxies where star formation is quenched (SN Online: 4\/23\/18<\/em>).<\/p>\n \u201cHow galaxies quench and why they stay that way is one of the most important questions in galaxy formation generally,\u201d Tumlinson says. \u201cIt just has to have something to do with the gas supply.\u201d<\/p>\n Using light from a quasar (QSO), researchers can \u201csee\u201d CGMs. In this example, spectra from two galaxies, G1 and G2, have certain wavelengths missing (red, in bottom boxes) where the CGM atoms are absorbing light.<\/p>\n One possibility, suggested in a paper posted online February 20 at arXiv.org, is that sprays of supernova-heated gas could get stripped from galaxies<\/a>. Physicist Chad Bustard of the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison and colleagues simulated the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and found that the small galaxys outflowing gas was swept away by the slight pressure of the galaxys movement around the Milky Way.<\/p>\n Alternatively, a dead galaxys CGM gas could be too hot to sink into the galaxy and form stars. If so, star-forming galaxies should have CGMs full of cold gas, and dead galaxies should be shrouded in hot gas. Hot gas would stay floating above the galactic disk like a hot air balloon, too buoyant to sink in and form stars.<\/p>\n But Hubble saw the opposite. Star-forming galaxies had CGMs chock-full of oxygen-VI \u2014 meaning that the gas was so hot (a million degrees Celsius or more) that oxygen atoms lost five of their original electrons. Dead galaxies had surprisingly little oxygen-VI.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was puzzling,\u201d Tumlinson says. \u201cIf theory told us anything, it should have gone the other way.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2016, Benjamin Oppenheimer, a computational astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, suggested a solution: The \u201cdead\u201d galaxies didnt lack oxygen at all. The gas was just too hot for Hubble to observe. \u201cIn fact, there is even more oxygen around those passive galaxies,\u201d Oppenheimer says.<\/p>\n All that hot gas could potentially explain why those galaxies died \u2014 except that these galaxies were full of star-forming cold gas, too.<\/p>\n \u201cThe dead galaxies have plenty of fuel left in the tank,\u201d Tumlinson says. \u201cWe dont know why theyre not using it. Everybodys chasing that problem.\u201d<\/p>\n The chase comes at a good time. Until recently, observers had no way to map a single galaxys CGM. Researchers have had to add up dozens of quasar beams to understand the composition of CGMs on average.<\/p>\n \u201cWeve been like the three blind people grabbing at the elephant,\u201d says John OMeara, an observational astronomer at Saint Michaels College in Colchester, Vt.<\/p>\n Teams using two new spectrographs \u2014 KCWI, the Keck Cosmic Web Imager on the Keck telescope in Hawaii, and MUSE, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the Very Large Telescope in Chile \u2014 are racing to change that. These instruments, called integral field spectrographs, can read spectra across a full galaxy all at once. Given enough background light, astronomers can now examine a single galaxys entire CGM. Finally, astronomers have a way to test theories of how gas circulates into and out of a galaxy.<\/p>\n A Chilean team, led by astronomer Sebastian Lopez of the University of Chile in Santiago and colleagues, used MUSE to observe a small dim galaxy that happens to be sandwiched between a bright, distant galaxy and a massive galaxy cluster closer to Earth. The cluster acts as a gravitational lens<\/a>, distorting the image of the distant galaxy into a long bright arc (SN: 3\/10\/12, p. 4<\/em>). The light from that arc filtered through the CGM of the sandwiched galaxy, which the team called G1, at 56 different points.<\/p>\n Surprisingly, G1s CGM was lumpy, not smooth as expected<\/a>, the team reported in the Feb. 22 Nature<\/em>. \u201cThe assumption has been that that gas is distributed homogeneously around every system,\u201d Lopez says. \u201cThis is not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n Light from a source galaxy is deflected and magnified by an intervening galaxy cluster to form the bright arc seen in the projected image at far right. Unlike a quasars narrow beam of light, the extensive arc lights up a large area of galaxy G1s CGM, showing it is surprisingly lumpy. <\/p>\n OMeara is leading a group that is hot on Lopezs trail. Last year, while KCWI was being installed, OMeara got an hour of observing time and was able to see hydrogen \u2014 which is associated with cool, star-forming gas \u2014 in the CGM of another galaxy backlit by a bright lensed arc. Hes not ready to discuss the results in detail yet, but the team is submitting a paper to Science.<\/em><\/p>\n So shes running a new set of simulations called FOGGIE<\/a>, which focus on CGMs for the first time. \u201cWere finding that it changes everything,\u201d she says: The shape, star formation history and even the orientation of the galaxy in space look different.<\/p>\n Together, the new observations and simulations suggest that the CGMs function in the life cycle of a galaxy has been underestimated. Theorists like Peeples and observers like OMeara are working together to make new predictions about how the CGM should look. Then the researchers will check real galaxies to see if they match.<\/p>\n \u201cMolly will post a really amazing new render of a simulation on Slack, and Ill go, Holy crap, that looks weird! \u201d OMeara says. \u201cIll go scampering off to find a similar example in the data, and we get into this positive feedback loop of going Holy crap! Holy crap! \u201d<\/p>\n While future circumgalactic studies will focus on gathering spectra from full CGMs, Tumlinson is hoping to squeeze more information out of Hubble while he still can. Hubble made CGM studies possible, but the telescope is 28 years old, and probably has less than a decade left. Hubbles spectrograph is still the best at observing certain atoms in CGMs to help reveal the gaseous halos secrets. \u201cIts something we definitely want to do,\u201d he says, \u201cbefore Hubble ends up in the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n This article appears in the July 21, 2018 issue of <\/em>Science News with the headline, "A Galaxy's Ecosystem: The circumgalactic medium is an invisible cloak that controls how galaxies live and die."<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a><\/strong> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Theres more to a galaxy than meets the eye. Galaxies bright stars seem to spiral serenely against th..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":85718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"yoast_head":"\nFrenetic fog[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\nWaiting for Hubble<\/strong>[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/sites\/default\/files\/2018\/07\/072118_cgm_inline-1.jpg\" "\\"Gas")
<\/p>\nThe circumgalactic census<\/strong>[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\nRecycling centers<\/strong>[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/sites\/default\/files\/2018\/07\/072118_cgm_inline-3_desk.png\" "\\"This")
![](\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/sites\/default\/files\/2018\/07\/072118_cgm_inline-3_mobile.png\" "\\"This")
<\/p>\nHow galaxies die<\/strong>[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\nReading what's not there[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/sites\/default\/files\/2018\/07\/072118_cgm_inline-5.png\" "\\"~~")
<\/p>\nGrabbing at the elephant<\/strong>[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/sites\/default\/files\/2018\/07\/072118_cgm_inline-4.jpg\" "\\"The")
<\/p>\nMUSE makes a mark[hhmc]
\n<\/h4>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/sites\/default\/files\/2018\/07\/072118_cgm_inline-6.jpg\" "\\"~~")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/sites\/default\/files\/2018\/07\/072118_cgm_inline-7.png\" "\\"FOGGIE")
Meanwhile, Peeples team is revisiting how computers render CGMs. \u201cThe resolution of the circumgalactic medium in simulations is, um, bad,\u201d she says. Existing simulations are good at matching the visible properties of galaxies \u2014 their stars, the gas between the stars, and the overall shapes and sizes. But they \u201cutterly fail at reproducing the properties of the circumgalactic medium,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n