There are as many as 2000 billion galaxies in the universe and each one is populated by hundreds of billions of stars.
As dizzying as these numbers are, this image of the so-called ID2299 is unique.
Released Monday by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), located in Germany, it shows a phenomenon never observed before: the "death" in "direct" of a massive galaxy located in deep space.
Quotes are important, as we will see ...
On his death, first.
ID2299 will be truly considered to be off once all of its gas is exhausted.
However, it is in the process of letting almost half of it escape (46%), as shown by the plume that we see in the image, and this at the rate of 10,000 suns per year.
With the other half of its gas, it produces stars at a rate that would make Stakhanov turn pale, hundreds of times faster than our Milky Way.
At this rate, ID2299 only has a few tens of millions of years to “live”.
On the scale of a human life, we can speak of interminable agony.
But that is little compared to the age of the universe captain: 13.7 billion years old.
Artist's impression
This is where the magic of time and space comes in: ID2299 is already no longer in this world!
It is located about 9 billion light years away, which means that its light took 9 billion years to reach us.
It therefore shows itself as it was when the universe was less than 5 billion years old.
The "direct" was somewhat delayed ...
At this distance, no photography is possible, as this image might suggest.
The latter is the work of Martin Kornmesser, a graphic designer who works for ESA, the European space agency.
As often in astronomy, this artist's view makes it possible to represent a phenomenon as one could observe it under ideal conditions.
On the other hand, the collision of galaxies at the origin of the formation of ID2299 and finally of its gas leak is very real.
It was discovered thanks to the ALMA radio telescope, located in Chile, which scans the sky in search of variations in the waves emitted by the universe, as so many testimonies of fascinating phenomena.
The "real" illustrations are to be found in an article published Monday in Nature, but they will not speak to laymen.