ASW0009io9 (9io9) is a gravitationally lensed system of two

galaxies A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar Sys ...

. The nearer galaxy is approximately from Earth and is designated , while the lensed galaxy is distant and is designated ASW0009io9 (shortened to 9io9). It was discovered in January 2014 by a group of citizen scientists, while classifying images on the website Spacewarps.org. The discovery was announced on the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

television programme ''

Stargazing Live ''Stargazing Live'' is a British live television programme on astronomy that was broadcast yearly on BBC Two over three nights every winter from 2011 to 2017. The series was primarily presented by scientist Brian Cox and comedian and amateur ...

''.

Name

The

Daily Mail The ''Daily Mail'' is a British daily Middle-market newspaper, middle-market Tabloid journalism, tabloid conservative newspaper founded in 1896 and published in London. , it has the List of newspapers in the United Kingdom by circulation, h ...

mistakenly named the galaxy 9Spitch and spread the news that Chetnik was the only discoverer of this galaxy. The term ''9Spitch'' comes from Zbigniew "Zbish" Chetnik's nickname ''Zbish'', after a BBC producer misheard his nickname. Chetnik was however not the only one who discovered the galaxy. First the galaxy was classified on the website by volunteers, including Chetnik and then it was followed-up with professional telescopes by astronomers, who named it Red Radio Ring (RRR) or 9io9 after its Space Warps identifier.

SIMBAD SIMBAD (the Set of Identifications, Measurements and Bibliography for Astronomical Data) is an astronomy, astronomical database of objects beyond the Solar System. It is maintained by the Centre de données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), Fr ...

and NED lists ASW0009io9 as one of the official names. The name 9io9 is the official name of this galaxy and 9Spitch is a name adopted by one newspaper.

Observations

The Red Radio Ring (RRR) was discovered by four independent groups, including the Space Warps project using deep images from the

Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope The Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) is located near the summit of Mauna Kea mountain on Hawaii's Big Island at an altitude of 4,204 meters (13,793 feet), part of the Mauna Kea Observatory. Operational since 1979, the telescope is a Pri ...

, a cross-match with ''Herschel''-SPIRE and ''Planck'' images at 350 μm to identify strongly lensed dusty star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) and follow up with

Large Millimeter Telescope The Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) (, or GTM), officially the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (), is the world's largest single-aperture telescope in its frequency range, built for observing radio waves in the wave lengths from app ...

, a detection with ''Herschel''-SPIRE 500 μm images to identify strongly lensed DSFGs, and identification of 9io9 as the strongest lensed DSFG in the 278 GHz maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and follow-up with the

Green Bank Telescope The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in Green Bank, West Virginia, US is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, surpassing the Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope in Germany. The Green Bank site was part of the National Rad ...

. The galaxy was studied with the Large Millimetre Telescope, which detected

carbon monoxide Carbon monoxide (chemical formula CO) is a poisonous, flammable gas that is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and slightly less dense than air. Carbon monoxide consists of one carbon atom and one oxygen atom connected by a triple bond. It is the si ...

in the lensed galaxy, and the

Subaru Telescope is the telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, located at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii. It is named after the open star cluster known in English as the Pleiades. It had the largest monolithic primary mirror in the ...

, which detected different spectroscopic lines associated with

star formation Star formation is the process by which dense regions within molecular clouds in interstellar space—sometimes referred to as "stellar nurseries" or "star-forming regions"—Jeans instability, collapse and form stars. As a branch of astronomy, sta ...

in the lensed galaxy. This study suggests a high star forming rate of about 2500 '' M_ʘ yr ⁻¹'' or a thousand times the star forming rate of the

Milky Way The Milky Way or Milky Way Galaxy is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the #Appearance, galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars in other arms of the galax ...

. The source reconstruction supports a compact core and an extended region, maybe indicative of a jet or lobe coming from an

active galactic nucleus An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that emits a significant amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, with characteristics indicating that this luminosity is not produced by the stars. Such e ...

(AGN). The galaxy might be in the center of a large

galaxy group A galaxy group or group of galaxies (GrG) is an aggregation of galaxies comprising about 50 or fewer gravitationally bound members, each at least as luminous as the Milky Way (about 1010 times the luminosity of the Sun); collections of galaxi ...

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study the magnetosphere * Asteroid cluster, a small ...

and it will likely evolve into a massive

elliptical galaxy An elliptical galaxy is a type of galaxy with an approximately ellipsoidal shape and a smooth, nearly featureless image. They are one of the three main galaxy morphological classification, classes of galaxy described by Edwin Hubble in his Hub ...

. Observations with the Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) and detailed reconstruction of the lensed galaxy suggests an approximately diameter rotating disk of gas. 9Spitch

9io9 was observed with the

Atacama Large Millimeter Array The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is an astronomical interferometer of 66 radio telescopes in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, which observe electromagnetic radiation at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. The ar ...

(ALMA) 12-meter antennas in December 2017 as part of project 2017.1.00814.S. The data revealed the presence of atomic carbon and

as a tracer of star formation. It was estimated that the total star formation rate of the molecular ring is about . ALMA also detected the cyanide radical travelling twice the velocity of the rotation of the molecular ring, with a

radial velocity The radial velocity or line-of-sight velocity of a target with respect to an observer is the rate of change of the vector displacement between the two points. It is formulated as the vector projection of the target-observer relative velocity ...

of . This is explained as a possible interaction between material outflowing from the AGN and interstellar material. Harrington ''et al.'' (2019) reports four independent detections of the Red Radio Ring, including the detection with Space Warps. In their paper they report new

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) is a radio telescope 5,064 meters above sea level, at the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in western Sou ...

(APEX) observations, presenting the detection of

nitrogen Nitrogen is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol N and atomic number 7. Nitrogen is a Nonmetal (chemistry), nonmetal and the lightest member of pnictogen, group 15 of the periodic table, often called the Pnictogen, pnictogens. ...

II205 μm. The velocity structure of the nitrogen is similar to carbon monoxide and they concluded that both share the same volume. The ratio of the nitrogen

luminosity Luminosity is an absolute measure of radiated electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic energy per unit time, and is synonymous with the radiant power emitted by a light-emitting object. In astronomy, luminosity is the total amount of electroma ...

and the infrared luminosity resembles more a normal star-forming galaxy and less a galaxy with star-formation influenced by a

quasar A quasar ( ) is an extremely Luminosity, luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. The emission from an AGN is powered by accretion onto a supermassive black hole with a mass rangi ...

Magnetic field

In 2023 observations with ALMA helped to detect a

magnetic field A magnetic field (sometimes called B-field) is a physical field that describes the magnetic influence on moving electric charges, electric currents, and magnetic materials. A moving charge in a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular ...

for 9io9, the furthest detected magnetic field ever detected at the time of the discovery. The field is a thousand times weaker than

Earth's magnetic field Earth's magnetic field, also known as the geomagnetic field, is the magnetic field that extends from structure of Earth, Earth's interior out into space, where it interacts with the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from ...

, but extends 16,000

light years A light-year, alternatively spelled light year (ly or lyr), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equal to exactly , which is approximately 9.46 trillion km or 5.88 trillion mi. As defined by the International Astro ...

. A field strength of around 500

μG In the metric system, a microgram or microgramme is a Physical unit, unit of mass equal to one millionth () of a gram. The unit symbol is μg according to the International System of Units (SI); the recommended symbol in the United States and Uni ...

was measured and the magnetic fields are orientated parallel to the gas disk of the galaxy.

References

External links

ASW0009io9 record
at Spacewarps.org * at

* {{DEFAULTSORT:9Spitch Overlapping galaxies Gravitational lensing 20140116 Astronomy in the United Kingdom Cetus