Scientists Discover a Galaxy With a Strange Tilted Heart– www.techexplorist.com

The spiral galaxy NGC 4698 is similar to our Milky Way but has a much calmer look. Its thin, smooth spiral arms flow around a bright central region. There are also dust lanes throughout the disk. At the outer edges, young, bright blue star clusters can be seen. While NGC 4698 may appear peaceful, it is actually a very chaotic system.

In most spiral galaxies, the arms curve inward toward the center and merge smoothly into the bulge; NGC 4698 is the exception, keeping its arms at a distance and forming a ring-shaped structure around the edge. The bulge consists of older, cooler stars and contains a supermassive black hole millions of times more massive than the Sun, but the really interesting point is how the bulge is oriented.

The bulge projects at a right angle and is only slightly visible above and below the dusty plane. Even more surprising, the stars and gas near the center rotate in a direction perpendicular to the rest of the galaxy. It’s as though two galaxies have been joined together, each one rotating at its own pace.

Astronomers think the off-center position of NGC 4698 is because it added gas from outside itself, or had a slight collision with another galaxy. When the galaxy took on gas from outside, the new gas could have formed into an angled disk, and then created stars that now move in a different direction than the rest of the galaxy. There are also reports of a faint hydrogen “tail” on one end, indicating there may be some remnants of an earlier event.