Messier 90 - Star Formation Activity

Star Formation Activity

As stated above, the star formation in Messier 90 appears truncated. Consequently, the galaxy's spiral arms appear to be smooth and featureless, rather than knotted like galaxies with extended star formation., which justifies why this galaxy, along with NGC 4921 in the Coma Cluster has been classified as the prototype of an anemic galaxy. Some authors go even further and consider it's a passive spiral galaxy, similar to those found on galaxy clusters with high redshift.

However, the center of Messier 90 appears to be a site of significant star formation activity. Multiple supernovae in the nucleus have produced 'superwinds' that are blowing the galaxy's interstellar medium outward into the intracluster medium. collimated in two jets, one of which is being disturbed by interaction with Virgo's intracluster medium as the galaxy moves through it.

Read more about this topic:  Messier 90

Famous quotes containing the words star, formation and/or activity:

    What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
    This fallen star my milk sustains,
    This love that makes my heart’s blood stop
    Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones
    And bids my hair stand up?
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    The formation of an oppositional world view is necessary for feminist struggle. This means that the world we have most intimately known, the world in which we feel “safe” ... must be radically changed. Perhaps it is the knowledge that everyone must change, not just those we label enemies or oppressors, that has so far served to check our revolutionary impulses.
    Bell (c. 1955)

    In literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)