The modern cosmological model of the Big Bang tries to characterize all the observed phenomena, including the galactic evolution. But the problem is that the model predicts too high a star birth rate.
All the necessary material in the galaxies had to merge with the stars when space reached a small part of the age of 13.8 billion years. But more than half of the observed galaxies are spirals and actively form stars right now. This is the main discrepancy between theoretical predictions and observations, which led to a more careful study of the processes of “stellar extinction”, which can slow down the speed of stellar birth. Without this, the standard model cannot predict the Universe known to us.
Scientists have put forward various mechanisms for extinction, including “feedback” from supernovae, destroying the clouds of stellar birth and reducing the rate of formation of new objects. The new study focused on magnetic fields and cosmic rays.
Analysis of the spiral-type galaxy center of NGC 1097 showed that a large magnetic field functions as a moderator for stellar formation. They also found out that this mechanism actually works around the galactic center. For the review, the Hubble telescope and the Very Large Array were used to track the influence of turbulence, stellar rays and magnetic fields on the stellar formation in the nuclear galactic ring. As a result, the researchers received an inverse relationship between the speed of star birth in a particular molecular cloud and the magnetic field inside it - the larger the field, the slower the speed of star creation. To achieve results, it was necessary to separate the magnetic field and its energy from other energy sources in the interstellar medium. The result sheds a connection on some astrophysical riddles. For example, it is now clear that star formation is possible only after the clouds are divided into smaller formations. So this area will have a higher percentage of low-mass stars. It is also interesting that the presence of supermassive black holes increases the power of the magnetic field, which is the most effective extinction method in galactic convexes.
