An international team of astronomers has reported the discovery of a mysterious new galaxy system as part of the DESI Ancient Imaging Surveys. The newly discovered system consists of a pair of galaxies and a large, highly parallelized tail of gas and stars. The discovery was reported on the preprocessing server on May 2nd. arXiv. Galactic tails may be characteristic features of a process or event that transforms galaxies. So exploring and studying these features can help us better understand how galaxies formed and evolved.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Dennis Zaritsky of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona has discovered an extraordinary new galactic tail with several interesting properties. The tail is associated with a binary system of galaxies.

First, while searching for low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies, researchers accidentally discovered the new S0/a galaxy, named PGC 1000273. The galaxy PGC 1000273 has been called the “Snake” galaxy because of its morphology, and observations have shown it to be about 610 million light-years away.

Additionally, a companion galaxy to Kite was discovered about 186,000 light-years away. The companion, designated PGC 070409 or Mrk 0926, is an active galaxy with an active galactic nucleus (AGN) at its centre. Kite-Mrk 0926 was found to have a long galactic tail of gas and stars, including a small galaxy called “Kite A” that showed no evidence of ongoing star formation.

“We present the discovery of an unusual tail originating in what we call the Serpent Galaxy,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

The estimated length of the tail was found to be about 1,240 light-years and a length-to-width ratio of 40. The images show that all emission nodes identified along the tail are emitted at an angle of less than 3 degrees.

Therefore, the newly discovered tail’s length, narrowness, and linearity make it an unusual example of a galactic tail. The Kite Tail is the longest optical galactic tail discovered to date. Even taller single galactic structures are some radio-detected head-to-tail systems that can be over 2,000 light-years.

What makes the kite’s tail extraordinary is that although it comes from the galaxy S0/a, which is expected to be gas-poor, it is rich enough in gas to support star formation throughout its length. Also, the tail is in a low-density galactic environment with no clusters or groups nearby, but in a close binary galaxy system where both galaxies are known to host the AGN.

Attempting to explain the origin of the detected elongated tail, the authors of the paper concluded that the most plausible scenario was a three-body collision between the kite Mrk 0926 and Kite A. One. galaxy.

“We hypothesize that the tail is the result of a three-body interaction in which the least massive galaxy is ejected at high speed… The resulting hyperbolic orbit explains the linearity of the debris field and the narrowness of the tail.” The researchers came to the conclusion.